Coco Gauff won a tennis match on grass for the first time in two years. Then she built on it

THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London – At some point, Coco Gauff would win another tennis match on grass.

After waiting until 7pm for No. 2 Court to become available, she made quick work of Germany’s Tamara Korpatsch, the world No. 78, on the first Monday of Wimbledon.

Needless to say, Gauff has won bigger competitions in her life and her turf career, but this was a long time coming. It was her first victory on grass in two years, which goes a long way toward explaining the big old grin that spread across her face as Korpatsch’s final ball flew over.

“I don’t regret the past, I just learn from it,” Gauff said on court, laughing about her losing streak after winning 6-2, 6-1 in less than an hour.

There wasn’t much mystery in this one. Gauff had more aces than double faults. She had more winners than unforced errors.

She was neat. She was clean. She took charge early and didn’t give up. She stepped on the gas like she said she wanted, having built a lead in a way she often hasn’t in the past month. She was everything she hadn’t been over the past two years on tennis’ most tenuous surface.

Then she built on it. She escaped upsets against Solana Sierra of Argentina and Claire Liu of the US with her trademark fighting and hands-on defense. She hit the ball through the court against No. 11 seed Belinda Bencic of Switzerland, hitting a homer on the grass field in her own game. And then she did the most remarkable thing of all: playing a mix of anti-grass tennis and first-strike offense to knock out compatriot and No. 4 seed Jessica Pegula.

After 24 months of pain, Gauff is in the semi-finals of Wimbledon.

In 2024, Gauff’s campaign ended with her standing in tennis disarray on Center Court, shouting at her coaches as she slid to a fourth-round defeat by compatriot Emma Navarro.

Last year she lost her first warm-up match at the Berlin Tennis Open, and then her first-round match at Wimbledon. Two weeks ago she lost another opening match on the grass in Berlin.

“We don’t have the best relationship,” 22-year-old Gauff joked during her press conference ahead of Wimbledon on Saturday. “I definitely think I have the ability to play on it. I think it’s more about the confidence.”

Seven years after her breakthrough week at the All England Club, when Gauff upset her idol Venus Williams as a 15-year-old to reach the round of 16, Wimbledon remained the only Grand Slam where Gauff had yet to reach the quarter-finals.

That seemed a little strange, considering the way Gauff started all those years ago. During her three wins in 2019, she was aggressive, taking control of the points and using her serve to keep her opponents at bay. Against Williams, she fired four aces in ten games. She won 78 percent of her first serve points and 73 percent on her second serve. She converted all three of her break points.

More than that, she stroked the ball with authority. At one point she won eleven straight points, against a five-time Wimbledon champion. There were few signs that day or the rest of the week that grass would become an Achilles heel for her.

Conventional wisdom would say that Gauff is too talented a player, and too good an athlete, to never discover grass – and preconceptions about a player’s style can sometimes obscure the reality of their records. When Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek, Gauff and Elena Rybakina came to Wimbledon last year, they ruled the pinnacle of women’s tennis.

Rybakina, the 2022 Wimbledon champion, and Sabalenka, the world No. 1, were seen as favorites. Gauff was in with a shot; Świątek seemed to be the outsider. Their winning percentages on grass were as follows: Rybakina 71; Świątek 68; Gauff 67; Sabalenka 64.

At the end of the tournament, Świątek held the trophy.

“I didn’t dream that because I thought it was impossible,” said Świątek, who won her 2025 semi-final 6-2, 6-0 and the final 6-0, 6-0 ahead of this year’s event before losing in the third round to Alex Eala, a 21-year-old rising star from the Philippines.

Świątek served about as well as they ever have during the two glorious weeks last year. She hit the corners and scarred the lines on her first serve, just like Novak Djokovic.

When Iga Świątek came to Wimbledon last year, the winning percentage on grass was 68. (Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images)

Telling a tennis player to serve well is like telling a pitcher in baseball to make batters swing and miss more. But there’s more to it than that. Gauff may be the best athlete in women’s tennis, but Świątek has the best footwork, the adjustment steps and small movements that get her to the ball and propel her from attack to defense and back again.

Gauff is incredibly fast, which helps on any surface. But speed doesn’t always translate into good footwork, especially on grass, where acceleration can actually work against players if they don’t know how to optimize it for a surface that can change in minutes as the humidity changes.

Świątek also has the racket speed, hand speed and controlled aggressiveness to consistently step in and take the ball on her forehand, even with her extreme Western forehand grip, the same one Gauff uses. Gauff can do this when she’s feeling good on the pitch, but recent defeats on all surfaces have seen her revert to aggressiveness when she’s had a lead, taking the ball later than she might like and putting herself in the background.

“She has fast hands and fast feet, so she can adapt,” Matt Daly, a coach specializing in grip technique who has worked with several top-10 players, said of Świątek during an interview. “If you don’t have the same skills, let’s call it that, it’s just very difficult to adapt.”

When Świątek lifted the Venus Rosewater Bowl, Daly had a vested interest in how she did it. He was one of Gauff’s coaches at the time and worked with her to adjust her grip and swing path to improve her serve and her forehand.

Gauff’s adaptability and Daly’s guidance helped her win the French Open in 2025, but three weeks later came a Wimbledon loss to Ukraine’s Dayana Yastremska, who slipped the ball under the roof of the No. 1 Court and sent Gauff rushing out of the building.

In Świątek’s box was Wim Fissette, who grew up in Belgium and played on fast carpet, which requires footwork similar to grass.

“Too many players concentrate on playing low, while my main focus is always light, especially on the first steps, but also when running through the ball,” Fissette, with whom Świątek parted ways earlier this year, said this week in a voice message that was about as good an introduction to grass tennis as there is.

“There should be no hard stops or hard starts.”

Speed ​​is also key to the shots players choose.

“A fastball is going to be really fast. It’s going to want to slide through it a little bit,” he said. “But on the other hand, if the ball is slow, it’s super slow. It’s probably the slowest of all the surfaces. Let’s say the ball falls out of the sky, or it’s a very defensive ball. It bounces low and you have to add a lot to it, so it’s actually the opposite.”

“So with fast balls you have to try to use the opponent’s pace, maybe redirect, but stay light on your feet. And if the ball is slow, very slow, you just have to strain your legs and try to get as much energy as possible to really do something with the ball.”

Coco Gauff reached the eighth finals at Wimbledon in 2019. (Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images)

Understanding Gauff’s path forward on grass requires a journey back to Gauff’s childhood. Gauff’s father and phonetic namesake (he’s Corey, she’s Cori) trained her to hit the ball differently than most women, to swing the big, sweeping forehand with heavy topspin and power more common in men.

Gauff was in her early years when Rafael Nadal, Świątek’s idol, took over men’s tennis with his remarkable forehand. Nadal also uses the Western grip, which directs the racket strings from low to high while practically pointing downwards. The violence of the movement generates enormous amounts of topspin.

During a neutral rally, that grip and movement usually works best when players can take a few steps back from the baseline. Unfortunately, that’s a terrible way to play tennis on a grass court, where the ball stays low and slides through the court. Gauff makes a lot of her money by sitting back, using her speed to chase balls and using her topspin to reset points until she can find an easy one to put away. Assuming the ball bounces high, that is.

“Her ball on the forehand is heavy and high and that is quite frustrating for players, but on grass it does not go above the shoulders,” said Rennae Stubbs, the former player and commentator who is helping coach Serena Williams with her comeback, during an interview.

However, there is a solution, as Nadal and Świątek have proven (although Nadal’s grip is slightly less severe than Gauff’s, Daly said).

They shortened their swings, stayed as low as they could and made it through the first week of the tournament with the grass at its slickest. After a week of play – and perhaps sunshine – the courts have a slightly higher bounce, giving Nadal and Świątek’s strengths a better platform to shine.

All of that requires the ability to anticipate shots and stay light on your feet. Digging in and pushing hard off the grass, as a gifted sprinter like Gauff does to generate speed on the first step, can spell doom, even though grass tennis shoes have small dimples on the bottom to give players more traction.

Like Gauff, Steffi Graf had otherworldly straight-line speed. “Twinkle toes” is how Stubbs describes her. She tells players to imagine they are running on ice.

Daly mentioned his good friend James Blake, who reached No. 4 in the world and won 10 titles but never got past the third round of Wimbledon.

“One of the fastest on hard courts, but he didn’t move as well on grass,” Daly said. “He had a very good game on grass. I just don’t think the movement was that natural.”

Gauff isn’t ready to give up yet. She wanted to create more good memories on the grass, and ahead of Wimbledon she said her training was going well.

“I was just really focusing on the footwork, the style of play and really trying to find my grass identity,” she said.

She seems to have found it just in time.