Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka meet at a tennis coaching crossroads in Beijing

The ‘other guy’ theory of coaches is a sporting truism.

A team that loses more than it wins with a so-called ‘players’ coach’, someone who specializes in relating to athletes and creating an easygoing atmosphere, will often replace them with a disciplinarian. Reserved coaches who don’t find success get replaced by high-energy, emotional types big on motivation. The bookish sort who focusses on the X’s and O’s comes back when that act wears thin.

Tennis players are no different, the latest cases being Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka, who dueled on Tuesday in Beijing at the penultimate WTA 1000 tournament of the year.

Both players entered the year with high hopes but did not meet them. After early eliminations from the U.S. Open — Gauff lost in the fourth round, Osaka in the second — they both announced coaching changes. 

Gauff jettisoned Brad Gilbert, one of the biggest personalities in the sport. He is an ESPN commentator and the former coach of Andy Roddick and Andre Agassi, with a grand unified theory of tennis, otherwise known as Winning Ugly. Gauff then brought in Matt Daly, a little-known grip specialist, to work alongside Jean-Christophe Faurel, the low-profile French coach who has worked with Gauff on and off since she was 14.

Faurel most recently rejoined Gauff’s entourage last spring, to work alongside Gilbert. Gilbert and Gauff barely knew each other when she hired him in the summer of 2023. Weeks later, she was U.S. Open champion.

Osaka, meanwhile, pivoted from Wim Fissette, the quiet, cerebral Belgian who helped her win two Grand Slam titles in 2020 and 2021. Fissette would be fine if he never appeared on television. Osaka’s new coach is Patrick Mouratoglou, the former coach of Serena Williams. He has a gift for motivation and self-promotion, with a brand empire that includes an academy in the south of France, plus the freewheeling Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS) tennis exhibition events and coaching camps at luxury resorts.

He was almost too recognizable for Osaka. Mouratoglou’s history with Williams and his presence in the game made her want to avoid him. 

“His persona is so big,” Osaka said in a press conference in Beijing. So big that she was skeptical of his coaching abilities: anyone coaching the greatest female player of the modern era might have enjoyed their part in the success of Williams.

“Then I met him, talked to him, worked with him on the court,” she said.

“He absolutely is a really good coach.”

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John Kerry, the longtime senator, U.S. secretary of state and American climate czar, once reduced his philosophy of governing, war and diplomacy to, essentially, ‘getting things right as quickly as you can when you are wrong’.

Sporting aphorists often cite the first law of holes: when you are in one, stop digging. 

Both basically sum up Osaka’s and Gauff’s coaching pivots. Players usually make these moves once the season ends, rather than with another two months to go. Gauff and Osaka are on the Asian swing, which is especially important for Osaka, Japan’s torchbearer at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago. Then come the WTA Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which Gauff may qualify for, and the Billie Jean King Cup in Malaga, Spain, which Osaka plans to play.

But by mid-September, they already had all the data they needed to conclude that they were either heading in the wrong direction (Gauff) or stalling (Osaka). 

While Gauff’s results were off target — with a fourth-round exit at Wimbledon to Emma Navarro before Donna Vekic defeated her in the third-round of the Paris Olympics — the bigger issue was of technique. Gilbert’s ability to cover up her weaknesses, one of his greatest strengths as a coach, had faded.

Quality opponents had figured out how to counter the looping forehand that he introduced to cover up her shakiness on that side. They would step in and take the ball on the rise, before it bounced high enough to trap them at the back of the court. 

Against Navarro at Wimbledon, she pleaded with Gilbert to tell her something, realizing in the moment that she did not have the tools she needed to escape Navarro.

Then there is her serve. At the U.S. Open, her fourth-round defeat to Navarro included 19 double faults.

“I don’t want to lose matches like this anymore,” she told reporters afterwards.

Gilbert, who has forgotten more about tennis than most people know, would never peddle himself as a serve specialist, or even the kind of coach that someone as mired in technical limitations as Gauff is right now would need. Even during Gilbert’s tenure, Gauff had worked with Roddick on some minor serve adjustments. 

In an interview last week, Gilbert declined to get specific about his work with Gauff, but said it was a positive experience overall.

He believes that the ultimate parameters of tennis have not changed. Players have to figure out their strengths, then they have to figure out what their opponent does well. Then they plan to impose their own strengths on the match, while nullifying those of their opponent. But at 63, after more than four decades around the pro game, Gilbert knows the drill. Once a player wins one of the Grand Slams, expectations rise, even though the competition remains fierce. Everyone wants to win and there are only four majors each year.

The women’s game has a little more unpredictability, Gilbert said, but still, “there isn’t a lot of opportunity”.  

“Each coaching experience is a unique experience and you move on,” he added. “That is a beautiful thing.”

Gauff, still only 20 years old, is impatient for success but she is taking the long view. She is approaching the fall tournaments in Asia as an extended pre-season, prioritizing improvement over wins and a top-eight finish for the season, which would qualify her for those season-ending tour Finals.

Her team prefers that her coaches speak little about her; she is finding that the subtle changes Daly has made have already begun to pay dividends. 

Daly, 45, played at Notre Dame and briefly coached Denis Shapovalov. He is the founder of a company that sells a gadget called GripMD, which wraps around the handle of a racket to help players use a traditional continental grip. 

Gauff hits her forehand with a heavy western grip, essentially holding the racket underneath the handle. Don’t look for her to switch to a continental grip on her forehand anytime soon — it just doesn’t cut it. Her immediate focus is her serve, but it might take some time before the dividends show up on the stats sheets. She had six double faults and 27 unforced errors across the two sets Tuesday, which she and Osaka split before Osaka retired with a back injury.

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If Gauff is taking the long view, Osaka wants results now. It wasn’t always this way.

She has been handed tough draws all season, most notably when she came within a point of knocking Iga Swiatek out of the French Open. At the time, she was introspective, coining a little aphorism of her own: the results weren’t resulting, she told reporters. Fissette and Osaka were focussing her comeback in the long lens — for this season and the next five years. Wait for summer and fall, when tennis moves to the hard courts on which Osaka built her reputation, was the mantra.

That waiting steadily chipped away at Osaka’s confidence. After Karolina Muchova defeated her in New York, she told reporters that a part of her dies when she loses. That Osaka was not the wry, magnanimous Osaka of Paris. The French Open was a lifetime ago in her world, and she had believed that she would have more success on her favorite surface. Muchova, who floated to the U.S. Open semifinals and was likely one stuck volley away from the final, is pretty much doing what Osaka wants to be doing.

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Osaka and the rest of the locker room know she needs to return better, improve her second serve and regain the confidence that, in her best moments, made her an absolute banker in crunch time. More than anything, that had been her superpower, and it’s been mostly missing this year.

This is why she switched to Mouratoglou with two months to go in the 2024 season. She is world No. 73, and desperately wants to get into the top 32, so she can be seeded at the Australian Open in January. 

Fissette, her former coach, is known as a master strategist and tennis technician. Confidence comes from results in his world. He shares with Mouratoglou a belief in playing aggressively, and building that intensity up when it brings results, but he is no one’s definition of a hype man. Mouratoglou could get a letter carrier fired up about delivering the mail.

Osaka had considered hiring Mouratoglou before she linked back up with Fissette, when she was plotting her comeback from maternity leave. She went with the Belgian then because of their history of success. When it didn’t return, she and Mouratoglou worked together in California after the U.S. Open, then decided to take on the women’s tour together. 

“I don’t want to have regrets,” Osaka added last week in Beijing. 

“I really need to learn as much as possible in this stage of my career. Patrick seemed like the guy with the information.” 

They were off to a good start, with three consecutive wins, including Osaka’s first comeback from a set down in over two years, against Yulia Putintseva. But even the best coach can’t have much success with an injured player. 

After shaking hands with Gauff at one set all, before the American carried her bag off court, Osaka said that her back had stiffened to the point of locking in practice. She was able to start but her condition worsened as the match wore on.

“Totally worth it though lol,” she wrote on Threads.

Sounds like something Mouratoglou would say.

(Top photo: Yanshan Zhang / Getty Images)