Daniell donating 50 per cent of 2024 prize money to charity

Every match matters on the ATP Tour. Marcus Daniell is giving that even more meaning in 2024, his final season as a professional.

The five-time tour-level titlist, who has climbed as high as No. 34 in the PIF ATP Doubles Rankings, announced earlier this year his Back With Impact campaign, in which he will donate 50 per cent of his prize money to highly effective charities.

After missing two years due to two knee surgeries, Tokyo Olympics men’s doubles bronze medalist Daniell was unsure if he wanted to compete again. He aimed to return to the Olympics to compete again for New Zealand. But something else also drove him.

The founder of High Impact Athletes, which helps educate and direct athletes to the most effective charities, thought he could accelerate HIA and spread awareness about the ideas it preaches.

“I thought there was an opportunity in trying to bring people who have supported me my whole career, or followed me my whole career along on this journey of giving. But in order to do that, I thought I'd have to make a commitment that perked people's ears up, and 50 per cent is a nice round number,” Daniell told ATPTour.com. “I think it's high enough that people understand how serious I am about this. I'm probably not going to make any money this year. But the amount of good that I hope we're going to do off the back of it is going to be, I think, incredibly rewarding.”

High Impact Athletes works with different organisations to identify the most effective charities in various sectors. The Kiwi’s donations will go towards HIA’s Maximum Good Portfolio.

“Donations get evenly split between all 12 of the charities that we support. So it's three core areas,” Daniell said. “Global health and poverty — that's the worst, most devastating human problems, usually in the poorest places. Animal welfare, mainly focused on the industrial side of animal production. And climate change, which you might think is self explanatory, but the interventions that have proven to be the most cost effective, it's different from planting trees. It's on a much larger scale than that.”

Daniell founded High Impact Athletes in 2020. Athletes involved include Stefanos Tsitsipas and boxer Joseph Parker.

“I think the most fun has been getting to know so many different athletes from so many different sports. I think this is true for a lot of sports, but particularly tennis, we're sort of a traveling circus. In a lot of ways, we're quite insular,” Daniell said. “We see roughly the same people week-in, week-out for 11 months of the year. And doing High Impact Athletes, we now have athletes from around 50 different sports from 30-something different countries.”

While at the BNP Paribas Open, where Daniell competed as an alternate with John-Patrick Smith, he took the time to walk around the grounds and speak to fans about what he is doing.

“The reactions were just awesome. I had people asking if they could hug me and give me handshakes and say ‘God bless’ and all that sort of stuff,” Daniell said. “I was so nervous before going out and doing it, but just actually seeing the response from people when they hear about and understand the authenticity behind it was really cool.”

Fans can learn how to support Daniell's efforts through his Back With Impact campaign. The core message that Daniell and his organisation are trying to send is twofold.

“One is, it really matters where you give. Some charities are simply a lot better than others at doing good in the world and so it makes sense to give to the ones that can do the most good. We help athletes do that,” Daniell said. “The second thing is, I think athletes have a unique lever to do good in the world, because even if you don't earn much money as an athlete, usually you have quite a large profile and people seem to listen to athletes about things wider than sport.

“I just think athletes have this unique opportunity to have an outsized influence on spreading good ideas, and I think the idea of effective giving is an extremely good one.”