{"id":81929,"date":"2025-04-02T17:24:45","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T21:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=81929"},"modified":"2025-04-02T17:24:45","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T21:24:45","slug":"paolini-splits-with-furlan-is-wta-coach-of-the-year-a-curse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2025\/04\/02\/paolini-splits-with-furlan-is-wta-coach-of-the-year-a-curse\/","title":{"rendered":"Paolini Splits with Furlan: is WTA Coach of the Year a Curse?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After 10 years of working together, <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2024\/11\/29\/jasmine-paolini-2024\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">Jasmine Paolini<\/a> suddenly announced her split with longtime coach Renzo Furlan. The official decision was shared after the Miami Open, where the Italian reached the semifinal\u2014by far her best result of the year\u2014shocking the tennis world. While no specific reason was provided, the unexpected decision has fueled speculation among fans.<\/p>\n<p>2024 was undoubtedly the best year of Paolini\u2019s career, as she reached the finals of the Australian Open and the French Open, made her top 10 debut, qualified for the WTA Finals, and even won Olympic Gold in doubles alongside Sara Errani. Such accomplishments wouldn\u2019t have been possible without Renzo Furlan, a former tennis player who played a crucial role in her team, offering her advice and significantly improving her game. He was also awarded the \u2018WTA Coach of the Year\u2019 title. However, just three months into 2025, he and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wtatennis.com\/players\/319280\/jasmine-paolini\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Paolini<\/a> parted ways.<\/p>\n<h2>WTA Coach of the Year: Award or Curse?<\/h2>\n<p>Shortly after Paolini announced the split, former British tennis player Mark Petchey wrote on X: \u201cBeing coach of the year is a poison chalice\u2026\u201d Even though some might dismiss it as mere coincidence, he isn\u2019t entirely wrong. The award was introduced in 2018, and almost every coach who has won it has ended their collaboration with their player shortly afterward.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Being coach of the year is a poison chalice\u2026 <a  href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/5eCRtKPMIs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">pic.twitter.com\/5eCRtKPMIs<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Mark Petchey (@_markpetchey) <a  href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/_markpetchey\/status\/1906716382722412860?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">March 31, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>It happened with Furlan, just as it did last year with Tomasz Wiktorowski, <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2025\/03\/17\/iga-swiatek-difficult-times-ballboy-incident\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">Iga Swiatek<\/a>\u2019s coach. The same fate befell David Witt, former coach of Jessica Pegula, who won the award in 2022, as well as Conchita Martinez, Garbine Muguruza\u2019s coach, in 2021. Before them, Piotr Sierzputowski, another former Swiatek coach, won in 2020, and the first-ever winner, Sascha Bajin, who coached Naomi Osaka in 2018, was no exception.<\/p>\n<p>The only coach who initially appeared to escape the curse was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wtatennis.com\/coaches\/1633392\/craig-tyzzer\/bio\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Craig Tyzzer<\/a>, who won in 2019 while coaching Ash Barty. However, as is well known, Barty retired from tennis just a few years later, in 2022, so even for &#8220;Tyzz,&#8221; there was no real happy ending.<\/p>\n<h3>Who Will Be Next?<\/h3>\n<p>We\u2019re not even halfway through the season, and anything can still happen. However, there are already three strong candidates for &#8220;WTA Coach of the Year 2025.&#8221; The first is Anton Dubrov, who has been coaching Aryna Sabalenka since 2020 and brought her to the top of the rankings. The second is Conchita Martinez, who won the award a few years ago with Muguruza and now aims to repeat the feat with enfant prodige Mirra Andreeva, who has already won two WTA 1000 titles. The third candidate is Bjorn Fratangelo, who not only coaches Madison Keys but is also her husband&#8211;<a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2025\/01\/26\/madison-keys-journey-prodigy-grand-slam-champion\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">she won her maiden Slam earlier<\/a> this year at the Australian Open.<\/p>\n<p>All three seem to have long-term intentions with their players, but as the WTA Coach of the Year award appears to be a curse, no one can feel completely safe.<\/p>\n<p><em>Main Photo Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After 10 years of working together, Jasmine Paolini suddenly announced her split with longtime coach Renzo Furlan. The official decision was shared after the Miami Open, where the Italian reached the semifinal\u2014by far her best result of the year\u2014shocking the tennis world. While no specific reason was provided, the unexpected decision has fueled speculation among [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5454,"featured_media":56510,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_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":[2,9,4],"tags":[5319,42736,42894,6457,42893,4705,364],"class_list":["post-81929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-news","category-wta","tag-jasmine-paolini","tag-news","tag-renzo-furlan","tag-tennis-news","tag-wta-coach-of-the-year","tag-wta-coaches","tag-wta-tour"],"modified_by":"Yesh Ginsburg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81929","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\/5454"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81929"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81937,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81929\/revisions\/81937"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}