So far, 2015 has been the year of the coaching carousel in women's tennis. While that merry-go-round is always spinning in the pro game, it has kicked into overdrive of late.
Over the last four months:
—Simona Halep has split with the man who helped her reach the Top 10, Wim Fissette.
—Eugenie Bouchard has split with the man who helped take her to the Top 10, Nick Saviano, and set up shop with Victoria Azarenka’s old mentor, Sam Sumyk.
—Vika, suddenly coachless, picked up with Fissette, while Sloane Stephens grabbed Saviano.
Got all that? Perhaps the least surprising of those moves is the last one. Stephens worked with Saviano at his junior academy in Florida when she was a teenager. He’s the man, Sloane has said, who taught her the technique that has made her a pro.
“If I went anywhere else,” she said at Wimbledon two years ago, “I guess I wouldn’t be as pretty to watch.”
In the past year, Stephens has tried out two very different coaches: the mellow Paul Annacone and the hard-nosed Thomas Hogstedt. Neither arrangement lasted for long, and her ranking plummeted from just outside the Top 10 to just inside the Top 50 as of today. Now she’s back on familiar ground, and while she has joked that the voluble Saviano can be a “little scary” when he barrels out on court, talking a mile a minute, for a coaching visit, she sounds happy to be working with him again. Or at least as happy as the ever-snarky Sloane can sound.
“I mean, it’s good,” she said about her relationship with Saviano, and his on-court coaching visits, in Indian Wells. “He’s talking about staying focused, executing my shots, making sure I was doing the things I needed to do, winning points, and things like that...Nick’s voice is someone you hear even when he’s not coaching you. I think it’s definitely good to have him there, especially nice for him to be able to come on court.”