Elena Rybakina and other players have high hopes for the new season, but makeovers don’t come easily in tennis

If you made a New Year’s resolution for 2025, you can expect to stick to it for roughly four months, according to a recent survey by Forbes magazine. That might not sound like long, but compared to some of us, it qualifies as a Herculean effort. The second Friday of January has come to be known as Quitter’s Day; as the name suggests, this is the weekend when thousands of Americans conveniently forget all about our vows to exercise more and imbibe less.

How long do tennis players stick with their resolutions? The pros would seem to have one big advantage over the rest of us: they can hire a full-time coach to help them stay with the program. Quite a few prominent names have done just that to start this season.

Iga Swiatek brought in Wim Fissette to kickstart her stagnant hard-court game. Novak Djokovic looked toward a fellow 37-year-old, Andy Murray, to find a way to out-wit the new generation. Elena Rybakina split with longtime coach Stefano Vukov (for now) and linked up with Goran Ivanisevic, a power player who might help her hone her own attack. Naomi Osaka spun the coaching carousel and landed on Patrick Mouratoglou, who once rekindled her hero Serena Williams’ love for the game. Coco Gauff continued on with Matt Daly and Jean-Christophe Faurel after cutting her own famous mentor, Brad Gilbert, loose near the end of 2024.

The opening days of a new season present every player with a clean slate. They haven’t fallen back into any bad habits, or tightened up at any important moments, or lost their confidence from any recent defeats. Everything seems possible again in the warm Australian summer.

Over the past few days, you could see that sense of possibility in Swiatek’s United Cup victories, where she seemed determined to show more positive energy than she had during her mostly subpar 2024. You could see it in the new shape that Rybakina was getting on her forehand, and the smiles that this stony competitor occasionally flashed. You could see it in Osaka’s comeback from a set down to make her first semifinal in more than two years, in Auckland. You could see it in Gauff’s and Taylor Fritz’s first-week wins in United Cup, which took the U.S. into the semifinals of that team competition.

But it also doesn’t take long for the clean slate to get some dirt on it. Even when players are winning, old patterns and habits and flaws—and the doubts that come with them—will re-emerge. Perfection is impossible in tennis, and makeovers generally aren’t completed in a single off-season.

Despite her early victories, Gauff’s two main problems—double faults and shanked forehands—haven’t disappeared in 2025. Swiatek’s energy turned fussy and negative again when she struggled to counter Katie Boulter’s backhand bombs on Sydney’s hard courts. Djokovic, after two straight-set wins in Brisbane, looked a half-step slower than normal while trying to catch up to Reilly Opelka’s serves in a straight-set loss to the American.

Then there’s Rybakina. The Kazakh has a history of starting quickly and thriving Down Under. Sshe made the Australian Open final two years ago, and last year she won the title in Brisbane. So far in 2025, she has looked as dialed in as anyone in her United Cup wins. Yet she hasn’t made a clean break from the past, either. Even as she and Ivanisevic are seeing success, she’s trying to add her old coach, Vukov, back to her team. So far that move has been blocked by the WTA, which is investigating claims of abuse by Vukov, and has provisionally banned him from the tour.

Change is hard in tennis, once a player’s basic grips and swings are set in stone. A few years ago, I asked Mouratoglou, who was coaching Gauff at the time, how many years she had to fix any problems with her strokes. He said it gets difficult after age 19. But that doesn’t mean improvement is impossible, or that tennis makeovers are a fantasy. Just ask Jasmine Paolini, who leaped from the far reaches of the Top 50 into two straight Grand Slam finals in 2024. We may see another meteoric rise like hers this season, but as Paolini herself proves, it’s impossible to know who it might be.

We’re technically at the start of a new season, but “seasons” in tennis are something of a convenient fiction. The last one, after all, just ended a month ago. In reality, there are multiple seasons each year, but we typically call them swings. There’s the Australian swing in January, the Middle Eastern swing in February, the Sunshine Double in March, the clay swing from April to June, the grass swing in June and July, and on from there. They happen in different parts of the world, on different surfaces, with short breaks in between.

This calendar, which is essentially a marathon broken up into middle-distance runs, has a big effect on players’ performances. Other than the Big 3 and Serena in their primes, very few pros can maintain a consistently high level of play for more than a couple months. In 2024, Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek were the game’s four best players, and they won seven of the eight Slams. But all of them had ups and downs as they moved from continent to continent and surface to surface.

Maybe the trick is to take it one swing at a time, prepare for each one as if it’s a season of its own, and don’t look any farther down the road. It’s just the second week of 2025, but the 11-month grind has already begun. Tennis players, unlike the rest of us, don’t have the luxury of bailing on their New Year’s resolutions by Quitter’s Day.