Coco Gauff, after a triumph and a letdown at the last two majors, is rebuilding for the US Open

MASON, Ohio—Winning a Grand Slam should boost your confidence, right? You’ve proven you can scale the mountain, so any doubts you had about your game should be magically dispelled.

Sometimes it works like that. We’ve seen players—Ivan Lendl and Angelique Kerber come to mind—win their first major midway through their careers and go on to make a habit of it. But sometimes the opposite happens. Sometimes the effort needed to win a Slam can leave a player drained, or vulnerable to a letdown.

That’s especially true if the Slam in question is Roland Garros. The tournament ends three weeks before another one, at Wimbledon, begins. Instead of basking in the glow of victory, and the achievement of a lifelong dream, the champion has to start practicing on a different surface right away. Rafael Nadal won 14 times in Paris, but followed up at Wimbledon just twice. Iga Świątek has four titles at Roland Garros, but it wasn’t until she lost on clay that she won on grass.

I don’t want to limit myself to just one [Slam] Coco Gauff

Which brings me to Coco Gauff. After winning at Roland Garros for the first time in June, she naturally wanted to take a minute to revel, so she flew back to the U.S. and made the rounds of TV and media with her family. Then she flew back, had a couple of days to practice on grass, and lost in the first round in Berlin and at Wimbledon.

“Mentally I was a little bit overwhelmed with everything that came afterwards, so I didn’t feel like I had enough time to celebrate and also get back into it,” Gauff said.

Rather than leading her on to greater things, Gauff’s breakthrough and its aftermath have left her close to square one to start the second half of the season. That means rebuilding her confidence and her strokes for a third surface in three months. Part of that process is finding the right mindset for dealing with success. Should you be satisfied with one Slam and relax a bit? Or should you try to forget about it and forge ahead as if it never happened?

Since Roland Garros, Gauff has gone back and forth, and finally settled on a middle ground.

“I think it definitely takes some of the pressure off,” she said on Thursday. “But I’m just trying to, I don’t want to limit myself to just like one. I would love to get as many as I can, and if I don’t do well [at the] US Open, I can say at least I went in with the mindset to win.”

Gauff started her preparations by skipping D.C., because she wanted to have a “real training block” before the WTA 1000 in Montreal. But success was still elusive. She survived two double-fault-riddled rounds before getting beaten by Victoria Mboko in an hour. Maybe the best thing to come out of the week was her run to the doubles title with McCartney Kessler. Having played just five singles matches since Roland Garros—and having lost three of them—Gauff must have welcomed the chance to hold up a trophy again.

Can she build on that feeling in Cincinnati? So far, Gauff seems to be part of the way back to where she wants to be before the year’s final major. She won her first-round match here in straight sets, then missed out on a rematch with Dayana Yastremska, who beat her at Wimbledon, when the Ukrainian withdrew. That, and the longer tournament schedule, left Coco with some time on her hands. She went to a Cincinnati Reds game and saw a horror movie, Weapons, by herself, something she told Tennis Channel that she wouldn’t recommend.

“I was just like, ‘Bro, why did I do this?’” she thought to herself as she walked through a creepily empty parking lot afterward.

Finally, on Thursday, having survived exurban Ohio alone at night, Gauff was ready to put her game to the test against 61st-ranked Lucia Bronzetti. The result was a 6-2, 6-4 win that was mostly promising, and occasionally concerning.

Most promising was her serve. There were a few double faults scattered around, but today that shot was a weapon rather than a liability. When she needed a point in the deuce court, she sent the ball bending wide. Bronzetti, even after setting up farther in that direction, had no answer for it.

“Second serve, obviously percentage was a lot, way better today,” Gauff said. “So just trying to, you know, be happy with where I’m at now, but still doing the things I need to do to improve.”

“Just trying to take the little wins along the way.”

Gauff’s down-the-line backhand was also effective. After she put one into the net, her coach, Matt Daly, told her, “I like that shot.” She kept going for it, and may not have missed it again.

The concerning element was a familiar one: Her forehand. When Bronzetti upped her pace, or kept a rally going, Gauff was prone to missing from that side, especially when things got tighter in the second set. But when she had to have one, she nailed it.

The moment came with Gauff serving at 4-4, 30-30. She had just double-faulted, and then watched as Bronzetti fired a forehand past her. Was the Italian going to force a third set? Was Gauff’s game going to hold firm? She gave us the answer when she took a mid-court forehand and confidently sent it into the open court for a winner. She held with a service winner, and Bronzetti donated the final game with two double faults.

“For the most part played aggressive, maybe got a little passive in a couple of those games,” Gauff said. “It’s tough, the balls are light and they fly, and she wasn’t really giving me much pace.”

“I was trying to play controlled but also aggressive, which for the most part I think I did well. I missed a couple of balls, but I learned from it.”

Gauff is into the quarters in Cincy. The last time she did that, in 2023, she went on to win here, and then in New York. To repeat that run, though, her second-half rebuild will need to keep progressing. Next she’ll get another, tougher test, from another, better, Italian, Jasmine Paolini.