Coco Gauff Addresses Pressure of Defending Impressive Titles at WTA Finals

The young star is learning how to contend with the ups and downs of competitive play.

Coco Gauff / Robert Deutsch-Imagn Images

Coco Gauff has been feeling the pressure this season. After closing out the 2023 majors schedule with her first Grand Slam title at the U.S. Open—after becoming the youngest American since Serena Williams in 1999 to do so—she entered into the 2024 competition with high expectations.

Of course, the experience isn’t totally foreign to the 20-year-old tennis star. You don’t make a name for yourself in the professional tennis world at just 15 years old without working well under pressure. But winning a Grand Slam introduced pressure of a different sort for the athlete. “Because of all my results last year and winning the US Open and coming in as defending grand slam champion,” she told The National during the WTA Finals, “I put a lot of pressure on myself.”

This year, she’s had to learn that it’s just “not that serious,” as she put it. As a Grand Slam champion—and a WTA champion, more generally—she will always be operating under pressure. “You're always going to be defending something,” she remarked. “If you want to win, you're going to be defending the next year. So I think for me, I just kind of try to treat it as like an evolutionary process.”

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Right now, at the WTA Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, she’s doing just that. After a slow 2024 season, which featured a disappointing loss in the U.S. Open Round of 16, Gauff traveled to China, where she secured her eighth career singles title at the China Open. It reinforced a lesson that she learned last season: “I could turn my season around any moment,” she explained, “and I had to relearn it again this year.”

On the ground in Saudi Arabia, she’s hoping that lesson “sticks” this time around, and helps her to get the job done at the WTA Finals, which gives the top eight players on the circuit the chance to compete against each for the season title.

Yesterday, the Georgia native defeated Jessica Pegula in her first group stage match. And tomorrow, she will take on defending champion Iga Świątek. Gauff will be looking to finish in the top two of her group of four, earning her a spot in the semifinals—and a better view of the title. Riding the momentum of her China Open win, another win in Saudi Arabia isn’t out of the question. In any case, we’ll be cheering for the young star.