Aleksandar Kovacevic is the New York-born American who reached the tour the way almost none of his peers did — through five years of college tennis, not the junior fast track. Born in New York City to parents who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia, his mother Milanka from Bosnia and his father Milan, a Serb who studied computer science at UCLA before working at Columbia University. He cites the 2005 US Open match between Novak Djokovic and Gaël Monfils, watched on Court 10 at Flushing Meadows, as the reason he started playing. He starred at the University of Illinois, earned a finance degree, then turned pro late and ground through the Challenger circuit to find the tour.
The game is built around a heavy, flat first strike. He's a right-handed power baseliner who takes time away with penetrating groundstrokes, and the serve carries the profile: over his career he's won roughly 75% of first-serve points and held serve about 83% of the time. The surface math is the tell — he's well above .500 on hard and indoor courts but a losing player on clay and grass, which is why his best results cluster on the quicker stuff.
The career arc has been a steady climb rather than a breakout. He made his Grand Slam main-draw debut at the 2023 French Open, drawn straight into Novak Djokovic. The signature wins came at the Los Cabos 250: he beat then-world-No. 13 Cameron Norrie there in 2023, and two years later reached the final after taking out top seed Andrey Rublev in the semis before losing to Denis Shapovalov, pushing his ranking to a new high. He peaked at world No. 54 in January 2026.
The defining run came at the Hamburg Open: entering as a lucky loser, he upset top seed Felix Auger-Aliassime and Camilo Ugo Carabelli to become the first American in the Hamburg semifinals since Pete Sampras in 1995. He carried that into the French Open, where the clay math caught up with him in the opening round.