Welcome to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where we’ll explain the stories behind last week’s on-court stories.
This week, exhibitions have taken over what we call the offseason even as the WTA Tour continues. Patrick Mouratoglou can’t help but mark academies with a capital M, Jessica Pegula says injuries have really helped her and Belinda Bencic is on the comeback trail.
Will Patrick Mouratoglou take over the brilliant world of tennis academies?
Since 1996, Patrick Mouratoglou, coach, future tennis disruptor and general impresario, has run one of the world’s largest tennis academies in the south of France. He is now opening an academy in one of the world’s tennis hotspots: the American state of Florida.
Mouratoglou Academy Zephyrhills will be located in what was formerly the Sarah Vande Berg Tennis and Wellness Center in central Florida, 30 miles northeast of Tampa and 80 miles southwest of Orlando. Mouratoglou has other academies in Nice, France; Atlanta, Georgia and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It also plans to open a facility in Melbourne, Australia in 2027.
The main selling point is, as always, Mouratoglou’s brilliance, given his association with Serena Williams during some of her best years, Coco Gauff, trained in France at his academy when she was 10, Holger Rune and Stefanos Tsitsipas. He currently coaches four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka. In a statement, Mouratoglou called the Zephyrhills project “the latest and greatest effort in our planned expansion into the U.S. market.”
This follows sports management giant IMG’s sale of its famous Florida academy, which pioneered the tennis academy concept in the mid-1970s.
Coaching legend Nick Bollettieri gathered some of the best players, housed and coached them on Longboat Key, just south of Tampa. IMG still has a few clients who train at the academy, but in recent years it has stopped serving future professional stars and has instead operated as a high-performance prep school for college hopefuls in tennis and other fields. sports.
This has created an opportunity for Mouratoglou and others to move into the ultra-high performance space with what he says is a hyper-personalized approach to training. All he has to do is produce.
He was also keen on tennis this week: Australian Alex de Minaur won more than $798,000 (£625,000) in the final of the Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS) in London, Mouratoglou’s new age vision for tennis. The man himself? In Los Angeles with Osaka.
Belinda Bencic’s next comeback?
In early 2017, Swiss player Belinda Bencic became the first teenager to reach the WTA top 10 since Caroline Wozniacki eight years earlier, largely after winning the 2016 Canadian Open by beating six top 25 players, including Serena Williams and Simona. Halep. Then came a wrist injury, surgery and a precipitous fall to the farthest reaches of the world rankings.
Bencic was not discouraged.
She came back from 312th place in September of that year to make the top 50 at Wimbledon 2018, and eventually reached 4th place in 2020, while winning Olympic singles gold the following year at the Games. Tokyo Olympics delayed by the pandemic.
In 2023, Bencic, then world No. 13, lost in the fourth round of the US Open. She did not perform again that year, announced in November that she was pregnant, and gave birth to her daughter Bella in April.
A little over a year after this announcement, the 27-year-old is world No. 481, but that’s an improvement, having been No. 913 before qualifying for the final of the WTA 125 event this week. last. French city of Angers, where she lost to American Alycia Parks. Bencic also reached the doubles final, with compatriot Céline Naef, and told the crowd “I missed it” before that match.
How far will it go in 2025?
How Getting Hurt Can Be a Blessing
Jessica Pegula said something rather strange last week in New York, where she was playing an exhibition at Madison Square Garden against Emma Navarro.
“Getting injured was probably the best thing for me, in a way,” said the US Open 2024 finalist » said during a small roundtable with journalists before the event. “Sometimes I need something to tell me to stop.”
Pegula was absent from mid-April to mid-June. She missed Roland-Garros, one of the four Grand Slam tournaments of the year. Hardly ideal. But then she returned for the grass court season with enough gas in the tank for the rest of the year, winning the WTA 1000 tournament in Toronto for the second year in a row and making the finals in Cincinnati and then Flushing Meadows .
Aryna Sabalenka’s team also said as much about his season. The best thing that happened to her was an injury that forced her to skip Wimbledon and rest for a month before the North American hard-court swing. She would beat Pegula in the finals of Cincinnati and the US Open and finish first. World No. 1 at the end of the year. Sabalenka’s coach Anton Dubrov said she also benefited from Belarus’ exclusion from the Billie Jean King Cup because of its support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But if players have to get injured at some point in the year to be able to perform at their best in the last four months of the season, doesn’t that mean there’s a problem? with the length of the tennis calendar or with its organization?
The shot of the week
De Minaur deceives the chief deceiver, Alexander Bublik.
🏆 Winners of the week
🎾 WTA
🏆 Alycia Parks (3) def. Belinda Bencic 7-6(4), 3-6, 6-0 to win the Open Angers Loire (125) in Angers, France. This is the American’s fifth WTA 125 singles title.
🏆 Maja Chwalinska (7) def. Ylena In-Albon 6-1, 6-2 to win the Mundotenis Open (125) in Florianopolis, Brazil. This is the Pole’s first WTA 125 singles title.
📈📉 Rising / Declining
📈 Parks gained 19 places from No. 103 to No. 84 after his title in France.
📈 Bencic rises 432 places from No. 913 to No. 481 after her run in this final against Parks as she returns after having a baby in April.
📅 Future
🎾 WTA
📍Limoges, France: Open BLS of Limoges (125) with Ekaterina Alexandrova, Dayana Yastremska, Anna Blinkova, Elena-Gabriela Ruse.
📺
Tell us what you noticed this week in tennis in the comments below.
This article was originally published in Athletics.
Tennis, sports business, Women’s tennis
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