How Coco Gauff got here to the Australian Open with a brand new serve and forehand

MELBOURNE, Australia – At Melbourne Park for the Australian Open, there may be a young woman who looks so much like Coco Gauff. She has the identical fiery, competitive eyes, the identical tendency to burst right into a giggle mid-sentence, and the identical variety of titles.

However, her tennis is different. This Gauff has change into the sporty version of an iPhone, with a brand new model coming out almost yearly.

The prototype was entirely focused on athleticism and attack. Then the forehand got shaky and in the summertime of 2023 Gauff 2.0 got here out, the winning version directed by Brad Gilbert.

Using high, heavy topspin on the forehand to guard its key weakness and chasing balls into every corner of the court to defend it day and night: This variation won the 2023 US Open, her only Grand Slam title.

Then the winning-ugly model stopped winning and the losses were ugly. Gauff fell behind then world No. 1 Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina, left Wimbledon and lost her US Open title to Emma Navarro, who hit another ball than even Gauff could manage.

Out went Gilbert, and in got here the event of Gauff 3.0, which focused on correcting the serve and forehand.

She and her team expected it to be a 3 or 4 month project. Gauff, who reached the US Open girls final at 13 and won her first match on Center Court against Venus Williams at 15, has a habit of arriving sooner than planned. She began to see results after her last reboot in three or 4 weeks, and has been trending steadily upward for essentially the most part since then.

Gauff has a record of 18-2 since her exit from the US Open. She has defeated her nemesis Swiatek twice and Sabalenka once. She won the WTA 1000 tournament in Beijing after which also the WTA Tour Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, earning her $5.5 million (£4.5 million), her highest earnings of all time in women's tennis. She then led the United States to the United Cup title in Australia, which included a victory over Swiatek.

Gauff 3.0, who starts her Australian Open on Monday afternoon against fellow American Sofia Kenin, was the version of Gauff that most of the competitors at all times feared would sooner or later come.

The version that will emerge if one worked out the issues with the wobbly serve and the unstable forehand, the 2 most vital shots in tennis.

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To achieve this, Gauff turned to 2 trainers, one recent and one who has accompanied her in all her developments. Jean-Christophe Faurel has worked together with her on and off since her early teens, nevertheless it is Matt Daly, a former D1 player within the NCAAs on the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, who has modified her recent game.

Daly got here on board weeks after Gauff committed 19 double faults in her three-set loss to Navarro on the US Open. In her press conference she said that she never desired to lose a game like that again. Whether she won or lost, she not desired to play ugly. Daly arrived to guide a number of the heavy reconstruction work that Gauff and her father, Corey, her first coach and still a significant presence, had deemed essential.

His diagnosis was that Gauff's grip caused her to hit the face of her racket too quickly during her serving motion. She didn't have enough time to make real contact with the ball.

Generally, most players use a continental grip when serving, as if shaking hands. Some players turn their hand a little bit further – for Gauff, a right-handed player, a little bit further to the left – bringing it closer to an eastern backhand grip.

This makes it easier so as to add topspin to the serve and is due to this fact often used on second serves to assist them on serve and out of the service box. In Gauff's case, she hit her second serves into the underside net too often. Before each serve, Daly had her draw a mark on her grip that told her exactly where to position her hand and rotate it back closer to the continent. The marking stays.

Turning your wrist millimeters might sound like a small change. That's not it. As Sabalenka discovered in 2022, tearing down a serving motion built up over a lifetime of repetitions is one of the vulnerable things a tennis player can do.

At first it looked as if Gauff's forehand also needed a grip adjustment. Like Swiatek, she principally grips her racket under the handle – a heavy western grip. Changing a forehand grip means changing the timing, swing arc, and the whole lot else concerning the shot. Experts told Corey Gauff that it may very well be a nine-month project.

Daly and Faurel didn't think this was needed. The problem wasn't her grip. It was her tendency to depend on her legs to grind, defend and hit, while shifting her weight backwards, which caused her to rise an excessive amount of onto the ball relatively than through it, causing her to knock it all over . If she did less of that and played more aggressively, emphasizing offense and offense more, she wouldn't be making as many forehands from difficult positions.

Instead of using her legs for defense, Gauff now uses them to get her into the early position to receive the ball more often with an aggressive, open-stance forehand.

In her pre-tournament press conference in Melbourne on Friday, Gauff said it wasn't all nice at first. She needed to persuade herself that she could handle the discomfort and awkwardness of holding and attacking the bat in another way. At some point the rewards would repay.

“Even though it's uncomfortable, I'm focusing on that long-term path and making sure I make the adjustments that I need to hopefully have a good career long-term,” she said.

From her standpoint, she didn't have much selection. The best players play more aggressively yearly. Defending in court became a tougher and fewer viable option.

“I know there will be some difficult moments in this tournament,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll get through.”

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Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion, could cause some problems for Gauff. She defeated Gauff in the primary round of Wimbledon in 2023. This defeat prompted her team to rent Gilbert to start out the ultimate Coco reboot.

In Melbourne, Gauff said the technical change in her game also affected her mentality. As her title defense in New York became difficult to endure throughout the tournament, she began to keep in mind that she had already won one and that she would have many more possibilities to win one other.

“As athletes, we get into trouble and losing feels like the end of the world, and winning feels like something we should do rather than something we should be grateful for.” No one gives us anything but ourselves such a sense. I feel I just realized it’s never that essential.”

Gauff played her final game of the 2024 season on November 9. She skipped the Billie Jean King Cup, traveled home to Florida and put her rackets away for the following two weeks. She has in the reduction of so much on her day by day fitness routine. She had no obligations to her sponsors, no fashion photo shoots. She traveled to California together with her friends for a music festival. She only played a competitive game again shortly before the New Year. It was the longest offseason she will be able to remember.

During the autumn, within the midst of Reconstruction, when the outcomes didn't matter to her, she tried to not let her mind wander to that place. It didn't at all times work out, but now she appears like she's playing the very best tennis of her life. Now it's a test of whether composure can last for a player who has fallen victim to frustration previously.

“Stay in the moment and enjoy it as much as you can,” she said.

“I did that in the last few tournaments. The results were therefore obviously good. But I’m just trying to learn to do that, even if the results aren’t that good.”