THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — Want to get one of the rising coaches in women’s tennis into a deep discussion about purpose and passion?
Don’t ask Sandra Zaniewska, who coaches the Ukrainian star Marta Kostyuk, about how she helped Kostyuk evolve from a promising talent unable to grasp her potential into a blooming threat in the second week of Grand Slams.
Don’t ask her about her playing career, when she became one of the top few hundred players in the world.
And don’t ask her about becoming a role model for female coaches, of which there remain precious few at the highest level of tennis.
All those subjects are important to Zaniewska, especially Kostyuk, the 24-year-old No. 12 seed and French Open semifinalist, who plays qualifier Ashlyn Krueger of the U.S. in the Wimbledon fourth round Monday. She is about as hot a player as there is in the sport right now, a winner of 19 of her past 20 matches. Kostyuk will say none of this happens if she doesn’t meet Zaniewska for coffee in London three years ago, to discuss what a partnership might be.
What really makes Zaniewska, a 34-year-old from Poland light up? A discussion about her ultimate dream — to be a writer.
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Some 25 years later, Zaniewska remembers the moment that dream came alive. She was in school and her teacher asked the class to write a short essay.
She doesn’t remember what she wrote about. But she remembers she wrote two or three pages. To her eight-year-old self, that felt like writing an entire book. The teacher returned it on a Friday. There was an “A+” written on it.
That evening, she and her parents left for a weekend away in the mountains. They were tired and still wound up in the work of their week. So Zaniewska kept her news to herself until the following morning when she could get her mother’s full attention.
Her mother was thrilled for her and asked to read the essay immediately.
“She was so engaged and then she was discussing it with me,” Zaniewska said during an interview on the eve of this year’s Wimbledon. “It was such a big moment for me. That was like: ‘Wow, I want to write a book one day. It was that day that I was like: ‘This is a bucket list thing, that I want to be an author.’”
So, in the process of guiding Kostyuk, she became one. Her newsletter, “The Unseen Court,” in which she lets the world in on the triumphs and travails of their coaching relationship, has joined the likes of former WTA player Andrea Petkovic’s “Finite Jest” and current player Claire Liu’s “Finding Claire-ity” as a revealing look into the inner workings of a mind, and a sport, which prizes the importance of interiority but rarely maps its contours so publicly.
Her latest entry, just ahead of Wimbledon, was about the importance of “doing nothing” as a coach.
“A coach can be right and still be unhelpful,” Zaniewska wrote.
“You can be completely right about what is happening — you can understand the tactical problem, the emotional pattern, the moment where the player is losing connection. And still, if you say it at the wrong time, in the wrong way, or from the wrong place, it might not land. It might make the player more confused, more dependent, more irritated, or more aware of something they were already trying to manage.
“I think a lot of good coaching lives in that uncomfortable space. Not in the dramatic intervention, but in the restraint before it.”
Sandra Zaniewska (left) and Marta Kostyuk have been working together for three years. (Robert Prange / Getty Images)
Zaniewska doesn’t write in Polish and translate. She writes in English, her second language.
She started learning it in elementary school. Then she left home for Turkey to train when she was 17 and she has been speaking English to everyone who is not Polish ever since. Unless she is at home or speaking with her family, she thinks in English.
“If I try to write in Polish, it’s terrible,” she said.
In her late teens and early 20s, she read a lot of modern fables and philosophical fiction by Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian writer. In recent years, she has veered toward non-fiction, from the likes of philosopher Alain de Botton.
For years, Zaniewska said, she tapped out thoughts and ideas about tennis and life on her laptop. It was more stream of consciousness than anything. Last year, she decided to try to put them into essay form, but not with any intention of sharing them with the world, especially since they were as much about Kostyuk as they were about her.
Eventually, she showed Kosyuk and asked what she thought. She told her she was thinking about publishing them as a newsletter at some point, but didn’t know if that was a good idea.
“She was like: ‘You have to do it, this doesn’t exist, you write great, you have the stories and I’m crazy,’” Zaniewska said. “I’m kidding. She didn’t say that but she was a good character, and she was very encouraging.”
Kostyuk, a tennis prodigy who was coached through her childhood by her mother (a former player herself), then went out on her own. In Zaniewska, she has found a kind of elder sporting sister. Kostyuk is outspoken and wears her emotions as easily as she wears her bespoke tennis kits. She speaks about her home in Odesa, where her family still lives under Russian invasion, and her work in therapy in recent years to separate her tennis results from her identity.
She also kind of loves seeing their relationship and Zaniewska’s experience coaching her come to life on the page.
“It’s always mesmerizing for me how she can put her thoughts into words and just make a story out of it, and I love to read it,” she said during a roundtable interview ahead of Wimbledon.
Earlier this spring, when Kostyuk won consecutive tournaments at the Rouen Open in France and then the Madrid Open, Zaniewska said she was getting a lot of questions about what she and Kostyuk had done to make things click into gear.
She wrote an essay, “The Illusion of Suddenly”, which addressed what she believed was the central flaw in the question’s premise.
“In tennis, you can have the level and still not always have access to it,” she wrote.
“You can know exactly what you want to do and still lose it when the match gets tight. You can play well for 30 minutes and then, almost without noticing, something shifts. The pressure changes the quality of the decisions and the margin on the aggressive shot gets a little smaller. The things that were working start to feel slightly less certain. Not dramatically, but just enough. Just enough that the match starts to slip.
“There’s a difference between a level that appears and a level that stays. And for a long time, that was the space we were navigating. Not trying to find something new, not searching for a missing piece. Trying to build the conditions where what was already there could be more reliable. More available. Not only on the right days, against the right opponents, when everything was in her favor.”
Sandra Zaniewska has translated her thoughts as a coach to a newsletter. (Robert Prange / Getty Images)
Zaniewska’s own process is similarly gradual.
She will have some thoughts. She will tap them into her computer. She will ruminate. She will think about the bigger idea behind what she and Kostyuk are dealing with at any given moment, and about how it coheres with the parts of the coach-player relationship that might otherwise be unspoken or hidden. At first, she thought every piece needed to provide an answer, or many answers. Over time, she realized it was fine to write an essay that left readers with a question.
She and Kostuk are coming up on their three-year anniversary together on July 15. She has been thinking about what the world should understand about where they started, where they have been, and where they are now. All relationships have their difficult moments. People might relate to that.
“I want to write about tennis, so they start on the court a little bit,” she said of the pieces. “I try to tie it into the court all the time, and then see how it can expand.”
Kostyuk keeps giving her plenty of material and proving the value of her words with every win. Just days ago, Kostyuk said she thought that getting to the second week of Wimbledon would be impossible, at least for this year anyway.
She’d never felt comfortable on grass. All she could remember were sub-par results. She was losing every practice set.
“I turned to Sandra, and I go: ‘Can you please tell me, honestly, right now, if you think that grass suits my game,’” Kostyuk said in a news conference after she beat Emma Navarro, the No. 23 seed from the U.S., to achieve what she thought was not attainable.
“She said, 100 percent.”
Sounds like a good jumping off point for an essay.
