O'Connell played his first professional match on the third-rate ITF Future Tour in 2011 and played a few occasional matches until he received a scholarship at the Australian Institute of Sport in 2012 , which has set itself the goal of promoting top-class sport. He didn't play on the tour for almost two years before he received a wild card for qualifying for the Challenger tournament in Burnie in 2014 and immediately marched to the quarter-finals. This was followed by a series of tournaments in Europe, where he won his first future title in Croatia. He finished the year in the top 500 for the first time. In 2015 he played a few sporadic matches on the Future and Challenger Tour, with his best result being a quarter-finals in Gimcheon . In 2016, O'Connell won five Future titles. He played almost 80 matches to improve his fitness and gain match practice. Due to his improved ranking, the Australian played increasingly Challengers in the second half of the year, where he reached a semi-finals for the first time in Sibiu and beat a top 100 player with Gerald Melzer . At the end of the year he was ranked 237.
2017: World Tour premiere
At the beginning of 2017, O'Connell received a wild card to qualify for the ATP World Tournament in Sydney , which he used and found himself in a main field for the first time in his career. There he lost to Gastão Elias at the start . Because of his performance, he was given a wild card for the Australian Open . At his Grand Slam premiere , he lost to number 15 in the world Grigor Dimitrov in three sets. At the beginning of February he finally set his record high in the world rankings with rank 219. From then on he played exclusively on the Challenger Tour, but was only able to win three matches there by the middle of the year.
Australia
Cordenons
Jeremy Jahn
Fairfield