2015 Preview: WTA No. 10, Dominka Cibulkova

First came the feast, then the famine for Dominika Cibulkova in 2014. She began the year by reaching her maiden Grand Slam final, in Australia; winning a tournament in Acapulco; and reaching the quarterfinals in Indian Wells and the semis in Miami. At the last event, she also cracked the Top 10 for the first time. Domi said she had always wanted to do it, just to say she had been there once. It’s good she made the most of the opportunity, because it was all downhill from there. After Wimbledon, Cibulkova played 10 tournaments and lost in the first round of seven of them.

Cibulkova overplayed early; she wasn’t used to going so  deep at each event she entered. But it’s also likely that her season was the tennis equivalent of a market correction. The 25-year-old Slovakian has always been precipitously hit-or-miss; until 2014, she was better at pulling surprise, one-time upsets than she was at moving up in the rankings. Hopefully a little rest in the off-season will give her some of her trademark high energy back.

The best case is that the first Domi we saw in 2014 was the real Domi—the one who fixed her serve, reined in her errors, beat Maria Sharapova and Agnieszka Radwanska in Melbourne, and looked ready, at 24, to join the big girls. Maybe with some smarter scheduling, she can get that Domi to hang around a little longer.

By the end of 2014, a couple of new faces, in Simona Halep and Eugenie Bouchard, and a couple of familiar ones, in Caroline Wozniacki and Ana Ivanovic, had sprinted past Cibulkova in the rankings. It will be tough to catch up to all of them. There’s only so much a player can do at 5-foot-3, and Domi may have done all she could last year.

It was a tale of two seasons for Cibulkova in 2014. She’ll need to combine the confidence she gained from the first half with the lessons she learned from the second half to put it all together again.

For more 2015 season previews, click here.