Over the first 10 days of 2017, we're examining the Top 10 players on the ATP and WTA tours—how will they fare during the new season?. All of the previews can be found here.
What a difference a year makes. In our preview of the 2016 WTA season, we wondered who might finally give Serena Williams a run for the No. 1 ranking. Garbiñe Muguruza, Victoria Azarenka and Simona Halep were three of the names mentioned; Angelique Kerber’s, however, never crossed our minds. Up to that point the German, who turned 28 during last year’s Australian Open, was a solid Top 10 player, but she had never reached a Grand Slam final in her 10 years on tour. And her defensive style wasn’t the type that we normally associated with major-title winners on the women’s tour.
But Kerber wasted no time proving us wrong. She beat Serena in the Australian Open final, and spent the rest of 2016 showing us that the victory was no fluke. By year’s end, Kerber had backed up her Aussie Open win with another at the U.S. Open, knocked Serena off her No. 1 perch for the first time since 2012, won a silver medal at the Olympics, and reached the finals at Wimbledon and the season-ending championships in Singapore. While Kerber didn’t win every event in sight, this formerly shy member of the WTA’s second tier finished the year with the swagger and self-confidence of a woman who believes she belongs at No. 1.
When she talked about “playing my game,” Kerber no longer meant defending and retrieving; she meant taking control of rallies. From the start of 2016, Kerber and her coach, Torben Beltz, had made dictating play their primary goal. She succeeded not by turning herself into an all-out attacker, but by turning herself into an opportunistic one. Kerber had always surprised opponents with her down-the-line forehand; in 2016, she had the confidence to hit it whenever she had the chance. Her biggest chance came in the U.S. Open final against Karolina Pliskova. On a crucial point late in the third set, with the Czech gaining momentum, Kerber sent a screaming winner up the line and stopped Pliskova in her tracks.