For two January weeks in Australia, the tennis world obsessed over how Madison Keys’ husband and coach, Bjorn Fratangelo, juggled his two roles.
Keys stampeded to the Australian Open title, playing the best tennis of her life in the third and final sets of her last two matches, unshackling herself from the expectations that had defined her career for 16 years to finally fulfil them.
Sitting alongside Fratangelo, in the coaching box at the corner of Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, was someone American sports fans might be more used to seeing on Monday Night Football — and he was spotted in Ben Shelton’s box, too.
Reshard Langford, a former American football defensive back, was with the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL between 2009 and 2011, playing in 17 games. Fast-forward 13 years and he is as surprised as anyone that he had something even beyond a front-row seat for an epic Grand Slam run, all while also riding shotgun for Shelton’s push into his second Grand Slam semifinal at the same tournament.
Go back to 2018, when Langford first began training tennis players as a strength and conditioning coach at the United States Tennis Association (USTA), and he was only just learning the way of the sport with fuzzy yellow balls. “I started doing research,” Langford said, during a February interview, of his first days working in tennis. “I was figuring out how the scoring works, how games work, how you win a match. Even the terminology. Everything was so new.”
Today, he has two of the sport’s top American players, and plenty of others, swearing by his work, not just on their bodies but also their minds.
“‘Lang’ has been an invaluable asset to my team,” Keys wrote in a message from Orlando, Fla., where she had spent a few weeks recovering from an exhausting month of non-stop tennis — and winning — in Australia before heading for the ongoing BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif.
“I’m incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by such amazing people who challenge me both physically and mentally, while also pushing me to embrace my most vulnerable self. His energy and dedication is truly inspiring, and motivates me every day,” Keys added.
Tennis throws up characters like Langford occasionally. Even with the most limited exposure, they quite suddenly find themselves training the best players in the world. They have to figure out how to adapt knowledge they honed in their speciality to the quirks of a sport that requires a very specific skill set.
Jason Stacy, the fitness and mindset coach for Keys’ defeated opponent in that Melbourne final, Aryna Sabalenka, started down this path 20 years ago when a friend asked him to help train Dimitry Tursunov, who would later hire Stacy to help coach Sabalenka. Stacy was an expert in Brazilian Juijitsu back then. Tennis? Not so much.
Gil Reyes was the strength and conditioning coach for the basketball program at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Andre Agassi brought him on board in the late 1980s and credited him with his mid and late-career success.
Like them, the 39-year-old Langford landed in tennis by happenstance.
He grew up in Alabama and played football at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., the most academically rigorous school in the elite Southeastern Conference. Stints with the Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles sandwiched his time at the Chiefs.
After his time in the NFL ended, Langford was working as a personal trainer when he reconnected with one of his former NFL strength coaches, Brent Salazar. In 2017, the USTA hired Salazar to fill the newly created role of director of performance. Salazar asked Langford if he wanted to come along to the USTA training center and try working in a new sport.
That’s when the cramming began, during which Langford found out that his preconceptions about tennis players were almost entirely wrong. Coming from the NFL, where some players weigh more than 300 pounds, he thought everyone else would seem small and weak by comparison. His image of a tennis player was someone skinny and puny.
Then he went to Indian Wells in March of 2018 and saw players training and playing, both on the courts and on the massive grass field that functions as a playground as much as a warm-up and cool-down area. He quickly realized modern tennis pros were bigger, stronger and faster than he had envisioned.
“It was a shock,” he says. “I knew nothing.”
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His eyes did tell him that there was a certain amount of overlap.
Like every athlete in nearly every sport, tennis players need to have a strong “athletic base”, as he calls it. They need to be able to generate power from a stable starting position, even when they get into that position after hitting another shot. They need to be able to use the ground as a source of energy.
That has only become more vital during his seven years on the tours, as things have become more physical. Tennis, Langford said, looks more and more like every other sport each year.
It still brings plenty of specific requirements, among them an endurance capacity that the rhythms of the sport require. Points last somewhere between one and 45 seconds. Then comes about 25 seconds of rest and recovery. Then another blast, with matches perhaps continuing this way for hours and hours.
Langford likes to put players on an exercise bike and have them rev up the intensity and resistance briefly, before returning to a lower rate of RPMs. Then he has them repeat that cycle over and over, to mimic a tennis match.
During the stretches of recovery, he asks them questions about their lives and how they are experiencing the pressures of this workout and the competition they face. “If you can’t have a conversation with me, I know we are doing things a little too hard,” he says.
Shelton has been a Langford disciple since turning pro in 2022, and has worked closely with him since moving to Orlando from Gainesville, also in Florida, last fall. At Indian Wells in 2023, the two got plenty of attention as Langford ran NFL-style pass patterns and Shelton showed off his junior football quarterback skills, launching passes across the venue’s sprawling grass player lawn.
Reshard Langford playing for the Kansas City Chiefs in 2010. (Amy Sancetta / Associated Press)
Shelton says Langford has a keen sense of when to push and when to hold back. That is especially important since Shelton, an American football player in his youth, basically never shies away from a challenge in the gym or on the track, even when he’s dragging and probably should.
“I’m never a person who is going to say no,” Shelton said, in an interview in early February, about his relationship with Langford. “It’s important to have someone who can find that balance for me.”
In Shelton’s case, Langford brings something else to the table as well. Every day he’s with him, there is a dose of humility. “There is not a lift, or a run or a strength contest I can beat him in,” Shelton said.
Langford was spending most of his time working with younger, less-seasoned players last year when Keys asked if he could help her. As they talked, there was a mind-meld over their journeys as professional athletes. Both had struggled to enjoy the pursuit of their dreams — to be happy with who they were, even when the results didn’t line up with what they might have hoped for.
That connection helped bring a level of trust. Langford saw in Keys what everyone has long seen: nearly unmatched power and the natural ability to transfer that from the ground and up through her kinetic chain.
He noticed something else, though — something that Fratangelo had picked up on as well. Her intensity in training didn’t match the intensity she strived for in practice sets and matches. There was a disparity in her levels of discomfort according to pressure, and so when things went sideways, as they do for nearly every player for stretches of every match, she would begin to unravel because she was uncomfortable.
In the off-season, Langford tried to put Keys in situations where she was not comfortable. He asked her to do things she didn’t like to do, such as pull-ups. Keys has always hated pull-ups. And push-ups. She hates those, too.
Langford told her there was no other way to build the resilience in her shoulders she was going to need late in matches, especially deep in tournaments, when things get really hard and players have to figure out how to keep their cool.
As Langford sat on Rod Laver Arena in January and watched Keys going the distance against the two best players in the world, Iga Świątek and Sabalenka, he noticed a kind of serenity about her. Fratangelo leaned over to Langford and told him he’d never seen her so calm in a match. “She seemed still,” Langford said. “The comfort and the discomfort became a thing for her. And it’s really cool to see.”
His work with Shelton is similar but different.
Shelton has never been averse to going to the edge either in training or in competition. It’s staying calm once he gets there that can pose challenges. He has strength to burn, but is still learning how to get his body into the right position to capitalize on it. “I can get a little frustrated with myself,” Shelton says. “Lang’s been working with me on how to focus on my breathing and bring it all back.”
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Langford does not profess to be an expert in tennis movement. Shelton spent much of 2024 working closely with strength and conditioning specialist Gabriel Echevarria on that front. Langford, though, has spent plenty of time on the court with top USTA coaches learning what players have to overcome during a point to get in the right position to make the best shots they can.
Balance, he said, has never been so important, especially in the men’s game, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy to get it, something anyone who has ever played high-level football — and maybe even recreational tennis — can understand. And that’s hardly the only similarity.
Football, Langford says, is all about how long you can possess the ball and take time and opportunities away from your opponents. Tennis, he has come to learn, is not so different.
“When you have more time, you hit the right shot,” he says. “Which is another way to take away time, which allows you to get into those positions where you have good balance, so that you can do it again.”
And again. And again. And again.
(Top photo: Cameron Spencer / Getty Images)
