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When her Wimbledon ended with a dispiriting first-round loss to Sofia Kenin, it would have been more than fair to say this looked like a disappointing year for Coco Gauff.
The 19-year old was still succeeding at a level 19-year olds generally don’t reach in pro tennis, but for someone who had long been expected to become a Grand Slam champion, it seemed like her trajectory had flattened out. Besides some technical flaws that weren’t getting fixed, she was consistently struggling to compete with top-10 players and seemed to be lower on confidence than at any point in her young career.
But a mere six weeks later, Gauff has thrust herself into a much different circumstance. After a coaching change, a couple tournament titles and a different level of belief in her game under pressure, she might just be the U.S. Open favorite.
Gauff’s 6-3, 6-4 victory Sunday over Karolina Muchova at the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati gave her the fifth and most significant WTA title of her career. Combined with her win earlier this month in Washington, D.C., it seems the switch has flipped.
“This is unbelievable, especially after everything I went through earlier in the summer in Europe,” she said. “I’m just happy to be here in this moment.”
Maybe it was only a matter of time that Gauff, who made her first splash into the second week of Wimbledon back when she was 15 years old, would start winning big titles.
But it also doesn’t seem like a total coincidence that things have turned around following a major coaching change.
Shortly before Wimbledon, Gauff hired former top-100 men’s player Pere Riba as her primary coach. Then, before the D.C. tournament, she added Brad Gilbert to the team as a consultant on a trial basis.
Gilbert, a former top-10 player and current ESPN commentator, has had several highly successful coaching stints, most notably with Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick.
Though it would be unfair to give all the credit to coaching — a few weeks of training, after all, isn’t going to result in huge changes to someone’s game — Gauff definitely looks like a different player right now.
Though Gilbert has insisted that he’s not overhauling Gauff’s forehand — the shot that has given her all kinds of trouble over the last couple years — there have been more subtle changes. Things like return position, tactics and being more aggressive with the weapons she does have are being emphasized.
It’s had the effect of giving her the confidence not to worry too much about the forehand, which can’t realistically be changed in the middle of a season. And the result is Gauff playing with much more freedom than we’ve ever seen since she burst into the spotlight.
“It beats you up — especially when everybody asks about the forehand all day long,” Gilbert told WTAtennis.com recently. “That starts to consume you. Also, it tears down other shots when all you can do is fixate on one thing. So I tend to not fixate on it at all.”
It was also notable during Cincinnati that Gauff did not have either of her parents in the players’ box. Gauff’s family has been a constant at her matches, which made sense given her age the first few years on the tour.
Gauff’s father Corey was a college basketball player, got her involved in tennis at age 6 and had basically been her main coach ever since.
“He’s the reason I play tennis,” she said Sunday. “He’s the reason I believe I can do this.”
Whatever the stereotypes are of nightmare tennis parents, the Gauffs seemed to be completely opposite — a totally normal, supportive couple that was not putting any pressure on their daughter to do anything other than what made her happy.
But even though she was comfortably in the top-10, Gauff’s results against the elite of the elite suggested she might need to start working with someone who could smooth out some of those technical issues and get her to the next level.
Once she realized that as well, things have clicked incredibly fast.
In Washington, Gauff called it “a rebuilding period.” But now it’s looking more like an elevator ride right to the top floor.
She won that tournament without dropping a set, knocking off three top-20 players in Belinda Bencic, Liudmila Samsonova and then Maria Sakkari in the final. She then went to Toronto, easily beating recent Wimbledon champion Marketa Vondrousova in the round of 16 before losing a tight three-setter to Jessica Pegula, her doubles partner.
And if there was any doubt that Gauff’s turnaround was real, her semifinal victory in Cincinnati over No. 1 Iga Swiatek looked like a major statement heading into the U.S. Open, which begins next week. In their seven prior meetings, Gauff hadn’t even been able to win a set off Swiatek.
What does it all mean for New York? We won’t have to wait long to find out.
Swiatek, who enters the U.S. Open as defending champion, is probably the favorite but not a significant one. No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka has struggled to close out matches this summer. Pegula is as consistent as they come but hasn’t yet broken through the quarterfinal ceiling at a Grand Slam. Elena Rybakina has had a fantastic year but got knocked off track with an illness at the French Open and hasn’t been totally right since.
In other words, this looks like a pretty wide open Grand Slam coming up, and nobody on the women’s tour is playing better than Gauff.
Given her immense talent, it’s probably a matter of when, not if, she breaks through at one of the majors. But for the first time in Gauff’s career, it really looks like her time is near.
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