It was more of the same on Monday from two women on opposite coasts. In the east, in D.C., Sloane Stephens lost 6-4, 4-6, 6-0 to Christina McHale in her first match since signing on with new coach Thomas Hogstedt. The opening-rounder wasn’t broadcast or streamed anywhere, so I didn’t see what happened in that mysterious blowout third set, but Stephens is ranked outside the Top 20 now, and has yet to reach the semifinals in any tournament in 2014. And for the second straight year, Sloane has made more news in a magazine—this time in an unfortunately titled Ellefeature—than she has on court.
Can Stephens learn anything from Ana Ivanovic, the woman on the west coast who kept doing what she’s been doing yesterday? What she’s been doing in 2014 is winning at a surprising rate. With her opening-round victory over Sabine Lisicki, Ivanovic won her 40th match of the season, making her the winningest woman on tour this year. She also did it from a 1-4 deficit in the first set. Ivanovic says she’s happy with her new coach, Dejan Petrovic, a Serb from Australia. Ana has always liked Oz, so maybe she’s finally found her perfect fit: a guy who can speak Serbian but do it in the easygoing tones of an Aussie.
We’ll see—perfect fits don’t tend to stay perfect for long with Ana, but she’s doing something right at the moment. The question for Ivanovic now is whether she can turn herself from a player who has had a good run for a few months, back into the type of player she once was—i.e., one who has a good run all year. Yesterday we saw a prime example of one of the former, Dominika Cibulkova. The Aussie Open runner-up cracked the Top 10 for the first time in March, but has fallen back to No. 12, and hasn’t reached a quarterfinal since April. On Tuesday she suffered another early loss, to an admittedly solid player, Garbine Muguruza. The tour is a grind, the season is long, and most players can’t sustain momentum for more than a few months at a time. Ivanovic may get a chance to show us how much momentum she still has a in a couple days, when she might play the woman she beat in Oz, Serena Williams.