{"id":44392,"date":"2022-01-02T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2022-01-02T17:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=44392"},"modified":"2022-01-02T11:06:28","modified_gmt":"2022-01-02T16:06:28","slug":"2021-season-review-coco-gauff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2022\/01\/02\/2021-season-review-coco-gauff\/","title":{"rendered":"2021 Season Review: Coco Gauff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s already been two years since Coco Gauff, then 15 years old, <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2019\/07\/02\/whats-next-coco-gauff\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">defeated Venus Williams<\/a> in the first round of Wimbledon. She became youngest player to win a match in a major draw since Jennifer Capriati in 1991 and was the youngest qualifier in Wimbledon history.<\/p>\n<p>Gauff announced herself to the tour so quickly that many fans have been expecting the upward trajectory to continue at lightning pace. It&#8217;s not quite been as fast as that but her trajectory certainly has been upwards.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s how the 17-year-old phenom progressed last year.<\/p>\n<h3>Improvements to Serve<\/h3>\n<p>Gauff&#8217;s serve has definitely been her Achilles&#8217; heel since she joined the tour. Like many younger players, she isn&#8217;t able to depend on it when matches get tight&#8211;in fact, in 2020, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/cgi-bin\/leaders_wta.cgi?f=A2021qqs91o1\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Gauff double faulted more often than almost everyone else on tour<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Though she still ranks among the Top 10 in terms of frequency of double faults, she has reduced her rate by over 3%, enough to significantly improve her second serve win percentage.<\/p>\n<p>On any surface, we&#8217;ve seen how dangerous she can be when she was feeling confident.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The first serve was devastating during the American hard-court swing, using it to ace her opponents frequently. The highlight of this period of the season was a quarterfinal showing in Montreal.<\/li>\n<li>On clay, she was <em>very\u00a0<\/em>difficult to beat, using her first serve to full effect in spite of the slow surface. This led her to a title in Parma, a semifinal in Rome (albeit off a retirement from Barty) and a quarterfinal at Roland Garros.<\/li>\n<li>The second serve was stronger on all surfaces but she used it very effectively at Wimbledon. It took the efforts of the former-champ, Angelique Kerber, to put a stop to her.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Overall, plenty of improvements to the serve! However&#8230;<\/p>\n<h3>Still Erratic<\/h3>\n<p>The double faults are reducing&#8230; but they are still there. And when they started, they were difficult to stop. Though she had a brilliant clay season, losses to Karolina Pliskova and <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2021\/11\/23\/2021-season-review-ons-jabeur\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">Ons Jabeur<\/a> in Madrid and Charleston respectively were riddled with this problem.<\/p>\n<p>Gauff also found other parts of her game unravelled when the pressure increased.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Against Barbora Krejcikova at the French Open, the most important match of her season, Gauff held five set points in the first set but couldn&#8217;t convert any of them. Visibly distraught, Gauff went down 5-0 in the second set as her forehand deserted her. She sprung a late comeback in the second but it wasn&#8217;t enough as the Czech sealed the match 7-6 6-3.<\/li>\n<li>A very similar pattern played out in Rome, notably also on the surface she preferred this year. Against Swiatek, after dropping a very tight first set, Gauff&#8217;s backhand (normally the more solid of the two wings) started to spray errors. She went down 5-1 and couldn&#8217;t recover, losing the match 7-6 6-3.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In the two biggest matches of her season, Gauff let emotions get the better of her.<\/p>\n<h3>Early Days<\/h3>\n<p>There&#8217;s definitely room for improvement. Gauff is enjoying a career-high of #22 in the world, defeating plenty of decent players this year (Sabalenka, Mertens, Sakkari, Vondrousova, Jabeur, Alexandrova, Anisimova, Konta etc.!), but she certainly hasn&#8217;t peaked.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s what should be taken away from this article. Gauff won&#8217;t rest on her laurels on the outskirts of the Top 20&#8211;disappointments this year will be fuel for <em>massive\u00a0<\/em>improvements as she&#8217;s still nowhere near maxing out her potential.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s easy to forget Coco Gauff&#8217;s career is only just beginning.<\/p>\n<p><em>Main Photo from Getty.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s already been two years since Coco Gauff, then 15 years old, defeated Venus Williams in the first round of Wimbledon. She became youngest player to win a match in a major draw since Jennifer Capriati in 1991 and was the youngest qualifier in Wimbledon history. Gauff announced herself to the tour so quickly that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3704,"featured_media":41220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2,9],"tags":[15300,24,3976,2747,3246,147,1096,896],"class_list":["post-44392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wta","category-featured","category-news","tag-2021-french-open","tag-angelique-kerber","tag-barbora-krejcikova","tag-coco-gauff","tag-cori-gauff","tag-karolina-pliskova","tag-ons-jabeur","tag-roland-garros"],"modified_by":"Yesh Ginsburg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}