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.”

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All About the Process

All About the Process

After three months, the results, tentatively, have begun to show. Stephens lost in the first round at the Australian Open and was 2-4 before the spring hard-court swing, but since then she has gone 7-1, with her one defeat coming in three sets to Serena Williams in Indian Wells. Over the last week in Miami, the 22-year-old has beaten two younger women who had passed her in the rankings, 18-year-old Belinda Bencic and 20-year-old Madison Keys.

On the one hand, these aren’t huge wins or huge surprises. Sloane has typically upped her game when she faces players her own age; like her fellow 22-year-old Bernard Tomic, she rises to the occasion when she has a chance to put her peers in their places. And this is hardly the first (or second, or third) time Stephens has made us wonder if she’s turned a corner and is ready to fulfill the potential we saw from her in 2013. Last year she reached the quarters in Indian Wells, then turned around and bombed out to Caroline Wozniacki in Key Biscayne, 6-1, 6-0.

It’s too early, in other words, to say for sure that we’re seeing a new, grittier, more committed Sloane in 2015. But there were differences, promising differences, in the way she competed against Bencic in their first career meeting on Monday. Stephens played with patience, subtlety, and tactical variety.

Bencic may be the better player in the long run, and I’d say she already has the edge over Sloane in competitiveness and court sense. (I love the way she moves forward, instinctively, to take the ball inside the baseline; she could teach many of the men a lesson in that regard.) The temptation for Stephens would have been to try to outhit Bencic and win with her superior athleticism. Rather than do that, though, Sloane fought her shot by shot, point by point, thought by thought. The two young women engaged in the chess match of the tournament so far.

Instead of standing straight up and rallying passively, Stephens worked the ball around; her crosscourt backhand was especially effective at getting Bencic, who doesn’t move as well as she may in the future, out of position. Instead of bailing out and going for broke from behind the baseline, Sloane stayed in the points and waited for something better. Instead of growing frustrated and throwing all of her hard work away in an eye-rolling fury when Bencic made a run in the second set, Sloane took extra time between points and made herself the steadier player in the tiebreaker. Even the touch on her backhand volley appeared to have improved.

I also liked what Saviano had to say to her when she called him out in the first set.

“You’re showing all the characteristics of a real champion,” he said. “Now push yourself every point...The goal here isn’t winning this set, it’s to play every point as well as you can.”

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All About the Process

All About the Process

Those words echoed what I thought was the difference in Sloane’s performance on Monday: She gave her utmost attention to what she did with each shot, and how she played each point. She appeared, for once, to be enjoying the process of tennis. It was easy to see, whenever she didn’t do that, what her problems have been as a player. Up a break point in the first set, Sloane grew impatient and finally did go for broke with a down-the-line backhand from well behind the baseline. She stood flat-footed, smacked it five feet wide, and let out a scream of anger. That’s the Sloane we didn’t see as much of yesterday.

The other Sloane, the patient Sloane, is now in her first quarterfinal in Miami. Can she stick around a little longer? Her next match will be against the No. 3 seed and champion at Indian Wells, Simona Halep. They’ve played four times, and each has won twice; but Halep was far the superior player when they met at the French Open last year. Stephens will likely have to play better than she did against Bencic to have a chance of reversing that result.

Whatever happens, let’s hope that the process, and Sloane’s investment in it, has just begun for her. Trying, as Saviano says, to play every point as well as she can is a good place to start.