Sebastian Gornzy is into the second round of the US Open 2026 after beating Raphael Collignon in a match he nearly let slip away, saving five match points before closing out the win. The college player from TCU turned a breakout debut into a statement result, and now he gets Daniil Medvedev next.
That is why his name is being searched today. Gornzy entered New York as a wildcard winner from the USTA American Collegiate Player Wildcard Playoff, ranked No. 731 in the ATP standings and coming off two defeats in Winston-Salem, one in qualifying against a player ranked No. 252 and another as a Lucky Loser against Cruz Hewitt, the son of Lleyton. He arrived as the sort of player most draws expect to disappear quickly. Instead, he survived five match points and stayed alive long enough to move deeper into the tournament.
The result matters because it fits a pattern that has made him easy to overlook and hard to dismiss. Gornzy has been a college player whose professional results have not yet matched his level at TCU, but the US Open gave him a different stage and he used it. The win over Collignon was not just an upset. It was the kind of match that changes how the rest of the field has to read him.
What sits behind that rise is even harder to ignore. Gornzy has said doctors once gave him a 5% chance of survival, part of a medical crisis in Kalamazoo that he has described as traumatic. He said that after his first-round match he started to feel very bad, and that in the second round he was down 5-0 and felt he could not play and needed to leave. That detail does not sit easily beside a player now walking into the second round of the US Open, but it is exactly what makes his run land with such force.
The clean line from here is simple: Gornzy has already turned one US Open match into a career-making result, and Medvedev is next. For a player who began the week outside the usual spotlight, the question is no longer whether he belongs in the draw. It is how far a player with this kind of resilience can keep going once the level rises again.
