Reilly Opelka is coming in strong in the new season. The American, who has been hungering for next title since 2022, kicked off at the Brisbane International taking down Dane Sweeny in his opening round with a stunning straight-set victory, 6-3, 7-5. But his best efforts, the quarterfinal didn’t go his way, though he still walked away with a milestone worth celebrating.

On Friday, the American power hitter stepped into the round of 16 with fire in his game against Kamil Majchrzak. The match stretched across three nerve-wracking tiebreak sets. In the end, the Pole took the win 6-7, 7-6, 7-6, but the stat that stole the spotlight belonged entirely to Opelka’s serve.

The towering American hammered down a jaw-dropping 44 aces, placing him third on the all-time list for most aces in a three-set match. Only Ivo Karlovic, with 45 in Halle back in 2015, and Milos Raonic, who fired 47 at Queen’s in 2024, have served more.

In official best-of-three ATP matches dating back to 1991, Reilly Opelka has carved out a spot in a very rare statistical neighborhood. He’s now the sixth player to pile up that many aces in a single match, a feat that instantly stamps him as one of the game’s most feared servers.

Opelka now shares that spotlight with Raonic, Karlovic, Mark Philippoussis, Nick Kyrgios, and John Isner. This is the group that turned the service motion into both a weapon and a spectacle.

Aside from Raonic and Karlovic, the rest have all reached that 44-mark milestone. For a man who stands 6’11” (211 cm), aces are practically in Opelka’s tennis DNA.

The former No.17 serving numbers go well beyond one match. He ranked second on the ATP Tour for most aces in 2025, trailing the American No. 1 Taylor Fritz. Reilly Opelka fired 790 aces across 49 matches, while Fritz led with 867 from 74 appearances.

Reilly’s still climbing, with 4,068 aces to his name so far, putting him in 61st place. The question now is how high he’ll climb from here.

He’s been working on his serve for a while, which used to be flawless but faltered for much of last year. Despite the hiccups, it looks like Opelka has figured it out.

Reilly Opelka admits to working on his serve

Opelka’s journey since 2025 has been a fascinating one to watch. Back in August, during the Cincinnati Open, the towering American was grinding through a tough match against Alex de Minaur.

His return-game numbers this season sat around 31.2%, but even when he held serve throughout, Opelka didn’t sound entirely pleased with how things felt off his racket.

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“I’m just trying to get back to my original motion, slowly,” Reilly Opelka told ATPTour.com in Cincinnati. “Now that my wrist has gotten a lot better and my range of motion has gotten back to where it was, I’m trying to get back to my serve motion where it once was. That for me was my best serving year, 2021. And then since the wrist got bad, I’ve had to change my mechanics to keep it out of pain.”

It’s easy to see why he’s focused on fine-tuning. Reilly leads the Tour in aces and has held serve in an incredible 89 per cent of his service games this season. Still, he’s been tinkering, searching for a smoother rhythm and a higher percentage of first serves. The work never stops, even when the stats say he’s already at the top.

“His serve, believe it or not, it was actually a challenge for a while, and it still can be,” his coach, Denis Kudla, explained. “Obviously, in the beginning of the year, he was healthy with everything else, but still had some issues where he wasn’t able to kind of have his old motion. So we were really trying to figure out how we could get him to serve the way he did, but he needed to have a slightly different motion.”

Now, fast forward nearly five months to the Brisbane International, and Reilly Opelka’s progress is showing. Against Majchrzak, he fired serve after serve with authority. Both players held strong from start to finish in a nail-biting contest.

Majchrzak saved one match point in the second tiebreak and two more in the third before sneaking through to his sixth ATP quarter-final.

He may be out of the tournament for now, but with that booming serve, it feels like only a matter of time before he scores something huge. What do you think? Could this be the start of a big run? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!