Coco Gauff made some coaching changes, but nobody was fired, as she added former coach Jean-Christophe Faurel to her team ahead of the clay season.
After weeks on hard courts, the American will move to clay in the coming days, and she has high hopes, with her first tournament being the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix, ahead of which she held a press conference.
The 20-year-old has always been a pretty good performer on the surface, as she made the Roland Garros final two years ago. She hasn't really broken through by winning a big trophy on the surface yet, as she did at the US Open on the hard courts, but it might just happen this year.
There is a lot of competition, of course, but she made some moves hoping to maximize her potential on the surface. One of those moves was hiring Jean-Christophe Faurel to her coaching team alongside Brad Gilbert, who has served as the main coach since Pere Riba left her team last year.
"Yeah, I added Jean-Christophe, I call him J.C., to my team. I started with him when I was 14. He was with me with that incredible run at Wimbledon. It actually wasn't either of our choices to stop working together."
"He was having visa issues and couldn't get into the U.S. for, like, a long time, a couple years. So once he got that all figured out and it became a perfect opportunity and the timing worked to be back together, I knew when we had stopped I always wanted to go back to him when all of that stuff got sorted."
As Gauff explained, they know each other really well, and she always wanted to work with him again. Now, the opportunity presented itself, and they both jumped on it. Gauff seems to be fully on board with the move, so that's a good indicator.
"So the timing worked where I was looking for someone, and we worked well together. I'm really excited to be back with him. It's nice to have someone on my team that knows me since I was young and knows me well. So I'm really, really excited to have him back on the team. Yeah, it's good. I'm glad that, you know, the government let us be together again (smiling)."
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