Coco Gauff is back where it all began in 2019: on the Wimbledon grass.
That might not be for the best.
Six years ago, Gauff was a fresh-faced 15-year-old, shaking hands with one of her idols after vanquishing her. She had just stunned five-time Wimbledon champion Venus Williams, beating her in straight sets on No. 1 Court in 79 minutes. It felt like more than a tennis match. It felt like a torch being passed.
It was the first of three wins that year for Gauff. She pounded her serve, saved match points and won the hearts of the British crowd. She played her way into the fourth round and onto Centre Court. She looked like a player who would grow up to win a lot on one of the most hallowed courts in the sport.
Six years and two Grand Slam titles later, Gauff is 21. She still thanks the players who blazed the trail before her at every turn, and she still has days when she can slide one 120-miles-per-hour first serve after another off the court and past her despairing opponent. She may still have countless Centre Court wins ahead of her.
Ironic as it might seem, the grass on which she announced herself now appears to be her worst surface, rather than her best. Wimbledon, the Grand Slam that made her name, might be the toughest tennis nut she has to crack. Gauff said as much this month during a news conference for the German Open in Berlin, before she played her first match since capturing the French Open title on the red clay of Roland Garros in Paris. She doesnt think grass is her best surface. She just wants to improve with each season. She has much to learn.
In her pre-Wimbledon news conference, Gauff said that she is ready to evolve.
You need to play a little bit lower and more aggressive than the clay season, which is difficult, because you spend however many weeks playing a certain way, she said.
Then we come on grass, and we have 13 days to completely not completely change, because you still have the core of your game but just change a little bit how you play.
This year, Gauff had less time than ever. A whirlwind post-French Open media tour included appearances on The Today Show and The Tonight Show in New York. She got a little downtime at home, with her brothers, her friends and her boyfriend.
Then came a journey back across the Atlantic to Berlin, where she walked onto a grass court against Wang Xinyu, the world No. 49. She played as one might have expected her to play, given her activities of the previous few weeks as well her record on grass, which that initial run at Wimbledon so often overshadows.
Wang beat Gauff 6-3, 6-3 in 75 minutes. It was the third top-10 win of Wangs career; it pushed Gauffs career record on grass to 21-11, a 65 percent win rate. Her rate on the other surfaces is 70 percent. Her Wimbledon winning percentage is her lowest at the majors, and its the only one of the four Grand Slams where she is yet to reach the quarterfinals.
Those arent the numbers the world expected to see six years ago, when Gauff was getting the better of seasoned professionals every other day.
The skys the limit, it really is, said Williams, who was just two years removed from appearing in the Wimbledon final, despite being unseeded for her encounter with Gauff.
Gauffs third-round match that year, against Polona Hercog of Slovenia, was probably the most impressive. It gave the biggest clue about what was to come. Gauff was the world No. 313 at the time. Shed received a last-minute wild card into qualifying, where she won three matches without losing a set.
Her first two wins, against Williams and then Magdalena Rybarikova of Slovakia, both on No. 1 Court, got her a spot on Centre Court, where she didnt disappoint. Hercog led 6-3, 5-2 and had a match point on Gauffs serve. The Florida teenager landed a backhand down the line to save it.
Hercog had another match point in the next game, but she double-faulted. Then came a second-set tiebreak, which Gauff sealed with a forehand winner to end a 32-shot rally. The crowd exploded with acclaim for their new star, and she went on to win in three, 3-6, 7-6(7), 7-5.
Simona Halep beat her in the next round 6-3, 6-3, a loss that aged very well. A week later, Halep was the Wimbledon champion. But the word was out: Gauff was coming after the grown-ups. She wouldnt be afraid and she wouldnt quit.
She will likely need those intangibles, as well as her speed, to better last years Wimbledon showing. She suffered a rare meltdown on Centre Court in the round of 16 against Emma Navarro. That was better than the year before, when she lost in the first round to Sofia Kenin. But the loss to Navarro was sound and painful.
Navarro used her flat power to push Gauff behind the baseline and punish her at-times shaky forehand. In the middle of the match, with Navarro cruising to a 6-4, 6-3 win as Gauffs serve collapsed, she pleaded with her coaches to tell me something that might turn the match in her direction.
The problem facing her then remains a problem now: Gauffs fallback on days when she cant find her groove doesnt work all that well on grass. On slower surfaces, and even on some hard courts, she can use her speed and fitness to extend points, making her opponents hit one more shot, and then another, until the pressure compounds and the errors start to flow. In swirling, unpredictable wind against Aryna Sabalenka at Roland Garros three weeks ago, Gauff used that skill to scramble the world No. 1.
Great athletes know how to hide their weaknesses, said CoCo Vandeweghe, the former pro and Tennis Channel commentator. Coco Gauff is one of the best competitors in all of womens sports. Shes always going to bring that relentlessness in every match.
On grass, where players can more easily slide the ball through the back of the court and die drop shots and volleys at the front, extending points can be a lot harder. As a strategy, it goes against the grass-court credo of first-strike tennis.
Defensive players will not win Wimbledon, Chris Evert, the 18-time Grand Slam champion and ESPN commentator, said during a conference call with journalists this week. The players that control and dictate points will win Wimbledon.
And then there is the other vulnerability in Gauffs game, which Navarro and others have exploited and which the lawns of SW19 magnify.
The forehand, said Pam Shriver, the former coach of Donna Vekić and a longtime commentator. That grip.
Gauff plays her forehand with what is known as a heavy western grip. She holds the racket practically underneath the handle. That can work great when the ball pops off the court. But on grass, it can be a real problem, because it can be extremely difficult to get the strings under or onto the back of a low-bouncing ball. Those long, looping forehands Gauff hits when she is defending her way back into a point are much more likely to break down on the grass.
They can fly into the middle of the net or way off the court. Iga Świątek, the five-time Grand Slam champion, has a similar conundrum, but her Wimbledon record (and grass-court win percentage of 72) is stronger than Gauffs.
Todd Martin, a two-time Wimbledon semifinalist and one-time coach of Novak Djokovic, said players like Gauff dont necessarily have to struggle on the grass. The same modern polyester strings that allow them to turn the ball over with topspin will work just fine with backspin, something Gauff has been showcasing of late with her hard slice forehand. The topspin can also fend off a player doing the right thing on grass by coming in to the net.
If you can spin it when someone is defending the net, they have to defend more airspace, he said.
What might help Gauff even more is her proficiency in the two shots that start every tennis point: the serve and return. She is elite at the latter, and has one of the biggest serves in the game when its working. It can get her out of all kinds of trouble on grass, especially because she can slice it out wide in the deuce court, curving the ball away from her opponent.
I want to be pretty aggressive with the serve here just because its grass, she said Saturday.
And yet, she doesnt have to be exceedingly aggressive. On grass, Gauff doesnt need to land her serve centimeters from the line; just get it into the right zip code and she is in business.
Shriver has one word for a good slice serve on grass: money.
She just has to get enough first serves in so that she can protect herself from getting rushed on her forehand on the second-serve return, Vandeweghe said. Thats where her forehand gets into trouble mostly, not when shes grooved three or four shots into a rally.
The problem is that Gauffs serve can be her Achilles heel, as much as a release valve. Its been a while since she had one of her 19-double-fault days, as she did at the U.S. Open against Navarro last year, but thats partly because when it goes south, she uses it to start the point rather than trying to finish it.
At the French Open, she backed herself to be able to block back enough of Sabalenkas blasts on the second-serve return. But catching up with those blasts from Sabalenka, but plenty of other players too is a lot easier on clay than it is on grass.
Does all this mean Gauff has no shot to win Wimbledon? Of course not. Go ahead, count her out; she loves proving people wrong. Also, her athleticism and competitiveness make her a tough out on any surface, and the womens title in south-west London has been one of the more unpredictable in sports for some time.
But while her 2019 run to the fourth round as a 15-year-old was remarkable, getting much deeper than that in 2025 might be even more so.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women’s Tennis
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