“The calendar’s so tight. A lot of tournaments … not as many days off as I want,” said Carlos Alcaraz at the 2024 Laver Cup. And two years later, those words still hit home for a lot of players including Taylor Fritz and Iga Swiatek, who’ve only continued to speak up on the issue.

On Thursday in Melbourne, world No. 2 Iga Swiatek kept her career Grand Slam dream alive with a smooth 6-2, 6-3 win over Czech player Marie Bouzkova to reach the third round of the Australian Open. The Polish star needed just 79 minutes to get it done, extending her streak to 24 straight Grand Slam appearances in the third round.

With Swiatek starting her season in strong form, the conversation quickly turned to the grind of the tour. In her post-match press conference, she was asked about Taylor Fritz’s recent comments on the shorter offseason and whether players are arriving at tournaments less fresh than in the past.

“Well, no, physically I feel good,” she said initially. “But for sure the schedule is packed. There’s not much time to reset completely. It’s kind of impossible.”

“So it feels like there’s no real beginning or end of the season. Honestly, for people who work physically for about 11 months, you basically get like 10 days without the racket. That’s not enough time to reset. Because that’s what I got,” Swiatek admitted.

She went on to explain how even those few days don’t really feel like a break. “For four days you’re still thinking about the season, and in the last days you already start thinking about preparing for the next one. So, for sure he’s right that the schedule is packed and that the season is getting longer and longer. But I guess everybody knows that already,” she added.

And this isn’t the first time Swiatek has spoken out about the brutal tennis calendar.

Back in November 2023, the world No. 2 openly voiced concerns about what her 2024 season would look like, with four Grand Slams and the Summer Olympics all packed into the schedule. When the WTA increased the number of WTA 1000 events to 10, she didn’t hide her frustration.

A year later, her message was the same. During the 2024 Cincinnati Open, Swiatek urged the “people who are in charge” to fix the packed schedule. She said tennis authorities were “pushing and pushing for us to play more” and stressed that “we deserve to rest a little bit more.”

That same frustration came up again in June last year, when Swiatek once more took aim at the relentless schedule. “The scheduling is super intense. It’s too intense. There’s no point for us to play over 20 tournaments in a year,” she said.

But what did Taylor Fritz say exactly about the tennis schedule?

Like Iga Swiatek, Taylor Fritz sounds injury alarm

After battling past Valentin Royer to reach the second round of the 2026 Australian Open, Taylor Fritz didn’t just talk about tennis. In his post-match press conference, the 28-year-old opened up about the grind of the tour and how tough it can be on the body.

“Yeah, I mean, if you look at the tour, it’s not just me. There’s a lot of people starting the year with injuries,” Fritz said. “It’s, you know, maybe the season’s too long… Maybe four weeks isn’t enough to fully get healthy of all injuries. It is what it is.”

“It’s, you know, maybe the season’s too long… Maybe four weeks isn’t enough to fully get healthy of all injuries. It is what it is,” added Fritz, who has been struggling with knee tendonitis, and has long been a vocal critic of the bloated schedule.

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This year’s Australian Open has been exceptionally brutal, with players like Alejandro Davidovich Fokina retiring mid match and others like Emma Raducanu and Stefanos Tsitsipas exiting while dealing with injury troubles.

The Tour is the most brutal it’s ever been with PTPA noting that more players withdrew from tournaments last season than they have in decades, per The Athletic.

Now, with more players skipping matches and injuries already starting to pile up, the debate around tennis scheduling is only getting louder. So what do you make of how intense the tennis calendar has become?