On Coco’s Coattails?
These players may still lag behind Gauff, but they are hitting on the rise…
Who doesn’t love a fairy tale? An outlier? A diamond in the rough who grabs a hold of the magic wildcard, sees the path and then blazes through in a fortnight before fans can figure out who or what just hit them. Disney has made billions on this perennial story. And Malcolm Gladwell, well… significantly less, but still.
One outlier on the women’s circuit hit pay dirt two weeks in Mexico on the road to the BNP Paribas Open, known more commonly as Indian Wells — before it was cancelled at the 11th hour on Sunday night due to fears of a corona virus outbreak. Canadian teenager, 17-year-old Leylah Fernandez, №118 (formerly №209), came within a set of bumping off Heather Watson, №49, the highest-ranked player left standing at the the Mexican Open in Acapulco, winning 12 straight sets before landing in her first WTA final on March 1. Watson hung on, though, just enough to grip the trophy at 6–4, 6–7(8), 6–1.
Now the talk of the Tennis Channel, Fernandez featured prominently in the Monterrey Open the following week, making it to the quarterfinals, before earning a wildcard berth into the main draw of Indian Wells. But Fernandez was not the only teenage phenom vying for the hearts of broadcasters on the road to Palm Springs.
Two more 17-year-olds, American Whitney Osuigwe, №138, and French player Diane Parry, №325, as well as 18-year-old American Hailey Baptiste, №233, were slated for the BNP Paribas qualifying rounds. Officials had considered letting the youngsters — and Kim Clijsters — do battle at the WTA Premier event without spectators, but ultimately declined. When the decision was made, California has reported 114 cases of the virus, including one in Rancho Mirage, about four miles away from the stadium.
“We are prepared to hold the tournament on another date and will explore options,” said Tommy Haas, the Indian Wells tournament director, at the time. When? No one is sure — finding another 10-day window during an over-extended touring pro’s 2020 calendar is akin to a government worker discovering 10 days of unused vacation.
Between now and the Miami Open, two short weeks away, players can take a quick flight to Guadalajara for the Abierto Zapopan. But a more likely outcome — for the teens, anyway — is Spring Break. The postponement of Indian Wells, however, leaves a large gap for the pundits to fill. How to do it? Speculation… on Miami, on Coco Gauff and on Fernandez — the new phenom.
The thing is, Fernandez isn’t… the new phenom, she is one in a line of many. Baptiste, the eldest, didn’t age out of juniors quite as quickly as the others, but when she left in early 2019, she won three ITF titles, giving her $75,000 to plug back into her career and training — making her and her parents less reliant on the GoFundMe they set up in 2017. She made her WTA Tour main-draw debut at the 2019 Citi Open — in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park, where she took her first lessons — and beat №2. Madison Keys in the first round.
“To see what (Caty McNally, Coco Gauff and Bianca Andreescu) are doing now is really cool, and it’s motivating for me because I know I can do it, too,” Baptiste says of her Florida training friends. “You want to compete against them, but also want them to do well. It’s… something to drive you.”
Meanwhile, with a one-handed backhand that has drawn comparisons to fellow countrywoman Amélie Mauresmo., Diane Parry made her WTA Tour singles debut at age 15 through the qualifying round of the 2018 French Open. A year later, at 16, she had her main-draw debut — and victory — by beating Belarus’ Vera Lapko in straight sets, 6–2, 6–4.
“It’s Amelie Mauresmo who taught me,” she told the WTA News of her signature shot.
Parry has skipped most of the ITF women’s events, preferring to continue with juniors, but with a first-round loss in the Australian Open qualifiers, she might make some appearances as the season shifts to clay in Spring. “I try not to think about the future. I try to improve myself on a daily basis, one day at a time and we will see how things turn out,” Parry says.
Last up, Whitney Osuigwe, on whose 17-year-old shoulders expectations probably weigh the most, nearly cracked the top-100 late last year after notching two $80,000 ITF titles and reaching the first round of the U.S. Open for the second year in a row. Before that, however, she was the former world ITF Junior World №1, as well as the first American girl to win the 2017 French Open juniors in 28 years.
But a junior champion does not a touring (and winning) pro make. And vice-versa. (See Taylor Townsend’s Open run.) “Pros don’t really let you in like juniors do, so I really need to stay focused and strong throughout the match,” Osuigwe has said. “The ones that have come before me, we learn from them and we try our best to copy a little bit what they did.”
Osuigwe, however, is tennis dynasty, representing the lengths to which parents will go to have offspring succeed in this world. The daughter of Desmond, a native Nigerian who played on the ITF Futures tour before moving to Florida’s IMG Academy (formerly Nick Bollettieri), and a mysteriously unnamed mother, Osuigwe was on the IMG courts by age six — in a Cinderella outfit. From there, she has defied the percentage tennis recommended to her by pros of all stripes going for — and landing — those mouth-dropping, off-the-wall shots at break-points, set points and even match points.
Osuigwe and her teenage club may look to break rules again by planning for Miami on March 25, as news outlets such as The Guardian say that risk-adverse tournament directors with adult problems, such as insurance policies, are bracing for cancelling the last Spring hard-court and even the Clay Court Season. The Miami health department has registered two cases of Covid-19 as of Monday.
“There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions,” wrote Jane Austen wrote in Sense and Sensibility. And so as Coco Gauff tweeted on Monday that she “was so excited to make my debut in IW, but safety is always the no.1 priority,” everyone is a little hopeful that a bit more sense and less sensibility prevails in coming weeks.
