Coco Gauff wins Cincinnati tennis title, could be US Open favorite
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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…
Read More: Coco Gauff wins Cincinnati tennis title, could be US Open favorite 2023-08-20 21:52:57