MELBOURNE, Australia — It happens in every match that Coco Gauff plays. Sometimes, it happens in every game, or seemingly on every point that doesn’t end quickly.
The ball comes sailing over the net to her forehand, a little deeper than neutral but not pushing her way behind the baseline. Instinctively, and perhaps unnecessarily, Gauff’s feet begin to backpedal as she pulls her racket back and readies herself for the next shot. Then, in one quick motion, Gauff throws all her weight onto the ball of her right foot — the back one.
Her right shoulder tilts back. And then she tries to slingshot herself forward, that back foot driving it all. Her left arm goes out wide, leading her shoulders and hips, twisting to muster every ounce of power she has behind that ball as her racket whips through, heading on a steep trajectory toward the sky rather than forward and out through the court.
The ball loops over the net, sometimes landing deep, sometimes barely in the service box. She has extended the point, creating another exchange in which she can outlast her opponent, as she does just about better than anyone.
Or maybe her opponent will see that defensive forehand, a work of pretty masterful athleticism, for what it really is: A tell that Gauff is on the back foot, literally and figuratively. For one point at least, and often for a few more, she is not playing the way she wants to play, and not because her opponent is forcing her to do so. Gauff, the world No. 3 and a two-time Grand Slam champion at 21, wants to be the one moving her opponent around the court, dictating rather than defending.
If she is hitting a lot of almost one-legged flamingo forehands off the back foot, then the rest of the match is probably going entail legging out a win, because she is not flowing into the court and taking the ball on the rise. She is not serving well. She is having to scramble backwards and sideways, to catch up with the returns of her second balls.
“It is something I work on now, making it more consistent and better,” Gauff said in her pre-tournament news conference Friday.
She’s likely to need it during her Australian Open, which got off to a decent start Monday with a 6-2, 6-3 win over Kamilla Rakhimova of Uzbekistan. It was a deceptive scoreline in some ways, as Gauff had seven double faults and 31 unforced errors, but Rakhimova did not have a reliable enough serve to take advantage of the times she had Gauff literally on her back foot. Olga Danilović of Serbia, her next opponent, does. So do all the players with single-digit rankings who Gauff will face if she can make it to the second week.
Two months before her 22nd birthday, Gauff has once again a Grand Slam as one of her sport’s greatest threats and one of its greatest mysteries all at once. In any given tournament, and in any given match, she can be mesmerizing or mystifying, from one set to the next.
Elite tennis is hard, and Gauff is young. She may be far removed from the 15-year-old phenom who burst into the tennis consciousness by knocking Venus Williams out of Wimbledon in 2019, having since become arguably the sport’s biggest star, but she also has to live under a microscope that few others ever experience. Her moves, her style choices and her words get picked apart like no one else’s.
She inadvertently caused a social media firestorm two weeks ago, when she accurately observed that American tennis fans who live in tournament cities around the world don’t show up with the same fervor as fans from most other countries, which can make matches more difficult.
People jumped on her for complaining about not getting enough support, so much so that she felt the need to clarify a statement that had been entirely clear.
Tennis-wise, she remains a ways away from the fine-tuning stage of her career. Though she has won two of the last nine Grand Slams, climbed as high as No. 2 in the rankings and become a mainstay of the top 5, she does not want this version of herself to be the near-finished product.
Surely a player with her athletic gifts and steely mind can still make big strides. When she was asked in a news conference what she had focused on during the off-season, she spoke in generalities.
“Just overall becoming better and more comfortable with my game,” she said.
“I would like to go deep in all the Slams this year. Obviously I would like to touch No. 1 ranking. That would be pretty cool. But yeah, I think just being consistent throughout the year.”
Top players often use phrases like that. Not wanting to tell the competition where they think their weaknesses lie.
Coco Gauff’s forehand is sometimes a weapon and sometimes a hindrance. (Darrian Traynor / AFP via Getty Images)
In Gauff’s case, the words fit, because she knows if she wants to fulfil her stated goal of winning “double-digit” Grand Slams, tinkering on the margins probably isn’t going to get her there.
She needs to harness the potential of her serve, which can approach 130 mph but is prone to falling apart in pressure moments. She is left blooping second balls into the middle of the service box, or dumping them into the bottom of the net. She needs to figure out how to stop hitting so many of those flamingo forehands, which can allow opponents to charge in, take the ball on the rise and pound it through the court.
But Gauff’s greatest tennis gift, at least for now, is how she has risen to close to the top of the sport with clear and match-swinging deficiencies in its two most important shots. She wins far more matches than a player prone to fits of 15 or 20 double faults at a time should, most memorably a three-set win over Danielle Collins at last summer’s Canadian Open, in which she gave away a whole set of points to them.
From point to point, she gets balls back. Between those points, her opponents have to think about how good they need to be to get the ball by her. Their margins get smaller. They start to miss. Gauff tends to win.
Still, it’s easier to win matches without two obstacles of her own creation. Hence the hiring last summer of Gavin MacMillan, the biomechanics coach who helped Aryna Sabalenka solve her problems with her serve and forehand. Along with Sabalenka’s evolution into a more rounded player, the greater security on those two shots has allowed her to win four Grand Slams and finish as world No. 1 the past two years.
Fixing the serve is easier than fixing the forehand, at least in theory. Serving is a closed skill: there are variables from sun and wind, but the player is in control of the ball and their actions from the start to the end of the motion.
Forehands are an open skill, with the infinite dependent variables of velocity, spin, court position and how much movement each shot requires out of Gauff’s control until her opponent’s racket dictates them.
Gauff can restructure her forehand all she wants in practice. But then she’s going to have to execute it, sometimes standing in the middle of the court and sometimes running at full sprint off it. She will have to master hitting it crosscourt and down the line, within six inches of the net and with six feet of clearance. She will have to hit it off slow balls and fast ones, balls that jump and spit and balls that skid and slide.
Like so much about Gauff’s game, there’s a good bit of improvisation behind the current one-legged forehand. She said she doesn’t remember when she started hitting it that way. It just came about naturally, and seemed to work with her big swing, and then it became embedded in her defensive arsenal, for better or for worse.
“It’s when I’m on defense, instead of squatting down, like a lot of girls do,” she explained.
“With the type of forehand I have, it’s just better to do that, which is what most of the guys do. It’s just the way my swing is, because I do a have a bigger swing, it’s better to give myself room than some girls can, like, squat.”
The squat-forehand is a specialty of Iga Świątek, who plays with the same extreme Western grip as Gauff.
The question now is how much Gauff will alter her techniques as she searches for the best version of herself. MacMillan is not a tinkerer. He has big ideas about how over the decades the players with the best serves and the biggest forehands harness snap their spines up and forwards to hit the biggest shots with the deadliest spin.
“A serve is just a forehand hit on a different plane,” MacMillan explained in an interview three years ago.
Gauff is famously secretive about her technical endeavors. What works for her might also work for someone else. Why give away expensive proprietary knowledge she is paying for?
On her serve, she is tossing the ball a couple feet higher and a little further into the court, or trying to. The higher toss gives her a little more time to find a smooth serving rhythm. It also allows her to stretch and jump up to hit the ball at a higher contact point, lessening the chances that she will dump it into the bottom of the net. Except when pressure and nerves make her arm tighten up and play tentative, as the first-round jitters did early on against Rakhimova.
Gauff double-faulted three times in the first game and spun some 75 mph first serves into the box throughout the first set. She double-faulted seven times in eight service games on the afternoon, including six in the first set.
“I don’t think I was accelerating enough, which is why a lot of the doubles went in the net,” she said. “As the match went on, I just told myself to accelerate on my serve more. Obviously when that happens, I get more speed and velocity. So I think the next match I’ll try and start quicker than I did today.”
When Coco Gauff transfers her weight forward and takes initiative, her forehand can be a true weapon, as it has been against the top two in the world. (Lintao Zhang / Getty Images)
Translated to the forehand, that philosophy would ideally have her hitting more forehands moving into the ball and then court instead of leaning backwards. She did more of that in her United Cup match against Świątek in the semifinals, and beat the six-time Grand Slam champion 6-4, 6-2, though the U.S. ultimately lost the tie to Poland. Gauff seems to find it easier to play that way against Świątek and Sabalenka, the two dominant players in the sport, uninhibited by the status of being a relative underdog.
“I really like the way she played against Iga,” said Chris Eubanks, the recently retired pro who is now a full-time commentator for ESPN. “She made a high percentage of first serves. She used a lot of variety, used some slow cutters, and then occasionally would pop one, so it kept Iga off balance, and it also kept her first serve percentage high, so she didn’t have to hit a lot of second serves, so I loved that.”
Eubanks is the closest thing the sport has to a Gauff whisperer. He has known her since she was six, when their families both lived in Atlanta. He used to train with her, doing escape rooms with her little brothers during the off-season. He sometimes hits with her between matches at tournaments.
He is certain that Gauff’s serve issues are mostly mental — “a match issue,” he called it. Her serve can often be lights-out in practice. He’s seen it so many times. It’s a matter of having the confidence to bring that serve and those mechanics into a match when important things are on the line, when pressure wreaks havoc with still-developing muscle memory.
His prescription for her is patient aggression. Use her legs to stay in points, play with variety and then when she sees a ball she can tag, go for it.
“She can do a little bit of everything,” he said. “She’s so good at competing and figuring out how she needs to play on the day in order to win a match,” he said. “I don’t think she needs to force her way to be aggressive.”
Eubanks is right. Gauff’s tactical awareness and her feel for the rhythms of a match is unquestionably elite. But there remains a thin line between patience and passivity, and when the serve speed dips, and she ends up having to hit all those forehands off the back foot, her opponent gets to play first-strike, or rather, first-opportunity tennis.
That’s what happened in her second United Cup match, against Jéssica Bouzas-Maneiro of Spain. Bouzas-Maneiro took advantage of a meek-serving, backpedaling Gauff to beat her 6-1, 6-7(3), 6-0. Gauff served 14 double faults and had 54 unforced errors.
“One of my worst matches of my career,” Gauff said of that loss. “So I tried to erase it and learn from it.”
After a stupefying afternoon, she morphed over to stellar for most of the rest of the competition, beating both Greece’s Maria Sakkari, a former top 10 player regaining her form, and Świątek in straight sets.
And with that, and the win over Rakhimova that set up a second-round duel with Danilović, the next season and chapter in the career of the most compelling elite player of her era is underway. Hopefully, Gauff said, with less defense and more consistency.
“Most areas in life, a 25-year-old or 26-year-old is more consistent than a 21-year-old,” Gauff said Friday. “I kind of look at that, but also knowing that I do want to be more consistent. I want to give it my all in each match.”
