How Coco Gauff came to the Australian Open with a new serve and forehand
MELBOURNE, Australia — There’s a young woman who looks a lot like Coco Gauff at Melbourne Park for the Australian Open. She has the same fiery, competitive eyes, the same tendency to break out in a giggle in the middle of a sentence, the same number of titles.
Her tennis, though, is different. This Gauff has become sports’ version of the iPhone, with a new model coming out just about every year.
The prototype was all athleticism and attack. Then the forehand turned wobbly, and Gauff 2.0, the winning-ugly version guided by Brad Gilbert, came out in the summer of 2023.
Putting high, heavy topspin on her forehand to protect its essential weakness and chasing down balls in every corner of the court to defend all day and night: That version earned Gauff the 2023 U.S. Open, her only Grand Slam tournament title.
Then the winning-ugly model stopped winning and the losses were ugly. Gauff fell behind Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina, and she lost at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open title to Emma Navarro, both in the round of 16.
Out went Gilbert and in came the development of Gauff 3.0, focused on fixing the serve and forehand.
She and her team figured it would be a three- or four-month project. Gauff, who made the U.S. Open girls’ final at age 13 and won her first match on Centre Court at Wimbledon against Venus Williams at 15, has a habit of arriving ahead of schedule. She started to see results from her latest reboot in three or four weeks, and it has been mostly upward since.
Gauff has lost just twice since her exit from the U.S. Open. She has beaten her nemesis, Swiatek, twice, and Sabalenka once. She won the WTA 1000 tournament in Beijing and then the WTA Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which brought her a $5.5 million payday, the richest in women’s tennis. Then she led the United States to the title at the United Cup in Australia, which included one of those wins over Swiatek.
Gauff 3.0, who kicked off her Australian Open on Monday with a win against fellow American Sofia Kenin, has been the version of Gauff that much of the competition always feared would come along someday, the version that would arise from working out the kinks in that shaky serve and unstable forehand, the two most important shots in tennis.
To do it, Gauff turned to two coaches, one new and one who has been with her through all her evolutions. Jean-Christophe Faurel has worked with her on and off since her early teens, but it is Matt Daly, a former Notre Dame player, who has transformed her new game.
Daly came aboard as coach weeks after Gauff double-faulted 19 times in her three-set loss to Navarro at the U.S. Open. In her news conference, she said she never wanted to lose another match like that again. Win or lose, she did not want to play ugly anymore.
Daly arrived to help guide some of the heavy reconstructive work that Gauff and her father, Corey, her first coach and still a major presence, had come to believe was essential.
His diagnosis was that Gauff’s grip made her whip the face of her racket through her service motion too quickly. She did not have enough time to make true contact with the ball.
In general, most players use a continental grip to serve; they grip the racket as if they are shaking hands. Some players rotate their hand a little — for Gauff, a right-handed player, a little to the left — turning it closer to an Eastern backhand grip.
That makes adding topspin to the serve easier, so it is often deployed on second serves to help them kick up and out of the service box. In Gauff’s case, she was too often spooning second serves into the bottom of the net. Daly had her draw a mark on her grip that told her exactly where to position her hand before each serve, rotating it back closer to the continental. The mark remains.
Turning the wrist a fraction of an inch may sound like a minor tweak. It is not. As Sabalenka found out in 2022, tearing down a service motion built up through a lifetime of repetition is one of the most vulnerable things a tennis player can do.
Initially, Gauff’s forehand looked to need a grip adjustment, too. Like Swiatek, she basically grips her racket from underneath the handle — a heavy Western grip. Changing a forehand grip means changing the timing and arc of the swing and everything else about the stroke. Experts told Corey Gauff that it might be a nine-month project.
Daly and Faurel did not believe that was necessary. The problem was not her grip. It was her tendency to rely on her legs to grind and defend and hit with her weight going backward, which led her to swing up too much on the ball rather than through it, shanking it all over. If she did less of that and played more aggressively, prioritizing offense and attacking more, she would not hit so many forehands from difficult positions.
Now, instead of using her legs to defend, Gauff is using them to get her in a position to take the ball early more often with an aggressive, open-stance forehand.
In a news conference Friday, Gauff said that none of this was comfortable at first. She had to learn to be comfortable with the discomfort and awkwardness of holding the racket differently and attacking. The payoff would come.
“Even if it’s uncomfortable, trying to focus on that long-term path, making sure that I’m making adjustments that I need to hopefully have a good career long term,” she said.
As she saw it, she did not have much choice. The best players are playing more aggressively every year. Defending the court was becoming a harder, less viable option.
“I know there’s going to be some tough moments in this tournament,” she said. “Hopefully I can get through them.”
The opening match against Kenin was the first of those potentially tough moments. Gauff won, 6-3, 6-3, but she double-faulted nine times and struggled a bit with her groundstrokes when Kenin kept the ball out of her strike zone. Gauff had more unforced errors than winners. Gauff 3.0 is still a work in progress.
Gauff said that changing her game technically has also had an impact on her mentally. In New York, when her title defense hung heavy over the tournament, she started reminding herself that she had already won one and she would have plenty of chances to win another.
“As athletes, we get caught up and losing feels like the end of the world, and winning feels like something we should do, not something we should be grateful for,” she said. “No one makes us feel like that except ourselves. I think I just realized it’s never that important.”
Gauff played her last match of the 2024 season on Nov. 9. She skipped the Billie Jean King Cup, went home to Florida and put her rackets away for the next two weeks. She dialed way back on any daily fitness. She had zero obligations to her sponsors. There were no fashion shoots. She went to California with her friends for a music festival. She did not play a competitive match again until just before New Year’s. It was the longest offseason she can remember having.
Through the fall, amid the rebuild, when the results did not matter to her, she tried not to let her mind go to that place. It did not always work, but now she feels she is playing some of the best tennis of her life. Now the test is whether the serenity can last, for a player who has become a victim of her frustration in the past.
“Stay in the moment and enjoy it as much as possible,” she said.
“That’s what I’ve been doing the last few tournaments. The results have obviously been good because of that. But just trying to learn to do that even when the results aren’t so good.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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