Coco Gauff had a pretty strange year in 2023 as she endured both the lowest point and the highlight of her career.
It was a pretty strange year for the American tennis phenom. On the one hand, she started it with a WTA 250 trophy in Auckland but then had a pretty bad run of results, culminating with an early exit from Wimbledon.
That was one of her worst losses, and she calls it the lowest point of her career. It kind of makes sense because it was the latest in a string of bad results, which made her career look like it was going nowhere.
She didn't know that only two months later, she would become a Grand Slam champion, and that low point might have been the catalyst and the 19-year-old talked about it ahead of her return to the 2024 ASB Classic, where she's set to begin her new season.
After Wimbledon I reached the lowest point of my career, losing that match. Learning from it helped me push forward and I think sometimes you need those setbacks to push you forward. Obviously, at the time I didn’t want to lose first round, but I think that’s what I needed.
The loss was certainly impactful because things changed pretty quickly after that. Yes, she had a new coach, and yes, she started to work with Brad Gilbert, but more generally, she shifted the way she perceives things, and it worked out well.
“Not to wake me up, because I felt like I always was awake, but realise that maybe you should put less pressure on every single match. “We’re playing a lot of matches in the year and I was putting so much on every match and too much for myself mentally.
After that match, I thought let’s take a step back and enjoy the tennis, enjoy the wins and the losses and I think that transferred into my results and even when I lost in Montreal to Jess (Pegula, leading into the US Open), I didn’t feel as disappointed after it.
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