Coco Gauff wins China Open the old way with new coaching team

Change coach. Win next tournament. Just like Coco Gauff drew it up.

Taking advantage of what has become one of the biggest rarities in women’s tennis, an off-day for Karolina Muchova, Gauff took the China Open title 6-1, 6-3, Sunday in Beijing.

That is no small thing, given the tumult in her tennis life during the past month. After losing to Emma Navarro at the U.S. Open, Gauff broke up with Brad Gilbert, her coach of the previous 14 months. Gilbert, a renowned strategist, joined team Gauff during the summer of 2023 and helped to guide her to the best month of her tennis career, including her maiden Grand Slam title in New York.

Enter Matt Daly, a little-known grip specialist, who is now working alongside Jean-Christophe Faurel, a Frenchman who has coached Gauff on and off since she was 14. Daly, more focussed on technique than tactics, is in the entourage because Gauff needs more than strategy. Still just 20, she has technical issues and some mental blocks with her forehand and her serve that can produce strings of errors at the most inopportune times — not that there are any good times for double faults and forehands into the net or long and wide. Gilbert was a master of covering up those weaknesses, but when opponents figured out how to unwrap them, he and Gauff could do little but watch the error count tick up until she lost.

Gauff has hit 315 double faults in 2024. The player with the next most in the top 10 is Danielle Collins, 76 behind with 239. She hit 19 in her fourth-round loss to Navarro in New York and she hit 11 in three-set wins over Paula Badosa and Yuliia Starodubtseva in Beijing, both coming from at least a set and a break down.

Her attritional resilience, outstanding athleticism and talent can still carry her to big victories. Now she seeks reliable stability on two of the three most important shots in tennis, and she found it, or at least more of it, against Muchova, in a matchup that the prodigiously talented Czech simply hasn’t figured out. Gauff hit 24 winners with just eight unforced errors in their latest encounter.

“You kicked my butt today, literally, again,” Muchova, who has been running hot since the U.S. Open, said during the awards presentation. Muchova made 24 unforced errors and had just 14 winners across the two sets.

Gauff had arrived in Beijing not expecting much. She is treating the final six weeks of the season as something of a pre-season, an opportunity to tinker and experiment without worrying much about results, since the tournaments she cares about most have already passed. The China Open was supposed to be all about preparation for 2025.

She and Carlos Alcaraz visited the Forbidden City in Beijing just before the tournament, and both ended up winning the title, with Alcaraz coming through a thrilling three-set match against world No. 1 Jannik Sinner in the final.

Gauff caught a break in the round-of-16, when Naomi Osaka won the first set but had to pull out with a lower-back injury that became too tough to deal with in the second. She came back from a set down in the next two matches, then rolled through Muchova.

Gauff would be first to admit that everything is far from fine. She’s still hitting too many double faults and her ground game needs work. After Sunday, she also has her second WTA 1000 title, the level just below the Grand Slams. She has a 7-0 record in hard-court finals (with Muchova’s final record now at 1-5) and she is a step closer to qualifying for the end-of-season WTA Tour Finals in Riyadh.

“Obviously it’s going well,” she said on court after her win.

(Top photo: Fred Lee / Getty Images)