For many reasons, few seats for women on the coaching carousel

The Break: WTA's new coaching initiative

Zina Garrison, a former Wimbledon finalist and world No. 4, was helping run a Maryland training program for a mixed group of elite juniors in the early 2000s. At one point, a mother asked Garrison if she would mind working with her son for a day. Garrison was happy to comply. It turned out to be a long day—for coach and pupil.

“He had no respect for me as a coach at all,” Garrison recollected, telling me that, “It just comes from what he sees, what he hears all the time. He just couldn’t get past that a woman was coaching him.”

That was some time ago. The reaction was not unusual, and in some ways things haven’t changed very much. The coaching ranks at the upper levels of tennis, both privately and institutionally (e.g. the national federations), are brimming with men. Women have made progress in many other areas once considered the domain of men, but this niche is an exception. It’s also one in which the emotional and physical entanglement, and even abuse of women by coaches (mostly but not exclusively male), is an omnipresent if largely private and rarely reported occupational hazard.

It isn’t a lack of numbers that keeps the status quo, it’s lack of confidence in the parent community. Zina Garrison, former Wimbledon finalist

The higher you go in the coaching food chain, the fewer women you find, which is why the WTA recently announced the Coach Inclusion Program, an initiative that, according to the organization, is geared toward “attracting, developing, and retaining women tennis coaches.”

“There’s been a little progress in this area, but not what we’d hoped for,” former doubles standout and Tennis Channel analyst Pam Shriver told me. “I think the way forward is for more players at the elite level to realize that women who played at a high level on the WTA Tour can really add a lot when it comes to understanding the culture of the tour, the pressures of being female on the tour, and all that comes with that.”

There are barely a dozen women among the roughly 125 coaches on the official roster of WTA certified coaches published on the tour’s website. They range from former Wimbledon champions Conchita Martinez and Marion Bartoli (who presently has no protégé) to relative unknowns like Belgium’s Ann Devries, who coaches compatriots Yanina Wickmayer and Alison van Uytvanck. This survey excludes parent-offspring combinations, like Melanie Molitor and daughter Martina Hingis, or Gloria Connors and son Jimmy.

Ironically, the most famous female coach of all made her bones coaching a man. Amelie Mauresmo, a two-time Grand Slam singles champion and former WTA No. 1, started working with Murray in the spring of 2014. The partnership lasted for about two years. While it did not produce a Grand Slam singles title, Mauresmo shepherded Murray to three major finals and a return to the No. 2 ATP ranking. The only Open-era coach to guide an understudy to a major title was Anabel Medina Garrigues, who supervised Jelena Ostapenko's unexpected triumph at the 2017 French Open. Curiously, that same year Conchita Martinez, another Spanish coach, was advising Garbine Muguruza on a part-time basis when she won Wimbledon.

The job facing the WTA is formidable for a number of reasons, starting with the extent to which men are entrenched in the field.

“The WTA has a nice idea in developing women coaches,” Garrison said, “but until the players buy into it, the juniors and the up and comers, it will be hard. It isn’t a lack of numbers that keeps the status quo, it’s lack of confidence in the parent community. You see this all the time. A woman brings a kid to a certain point of development, then switches him or her over to a guy, never a woman.”

It doesn’t help the cause of women coaches that very few top pros have been willing to take a chance on a female coach. Kelly Wolf, a vice president at powerhouse talent agency Octagon, told me, “Here’s the weird thing: Why shouldn’t a young woman feel that she wants a female coach? That’s a big question.”

Cultural and social elements like gender discrimination or patriarchal mores offer some answers, but the reliance on male coaches is also a vestige of the days when a coach fulfilled many roles, including that of a hitting partner whose power and pace gave women a leg up on much of the competition.

“The criticism is that someone like me (an older, retired female pro) goes out there, all she can do is feed balls,” Shriver said. “But hitting partners are common now. A lot of top coaches of men aren’t hitting the ball, either. There’s other ways to get that done now.”

Perhaps most important, recruitment of the most qualified veterans into the coaching ranks has proven challenging. Alexandra Stevenson shocked tennis in 1999 when, just two weeks out of high school, she reached the semifinals of Wimbledon. Now an analyst for ESPN, Stevenson was still plugging away on the tour until Covid brought everything to a grinding halt. During the ensuing lockdown, Stevenson began coaching a group of local kids on the court at Shriver’s Los Angeles home. Ultimately, Stevenson took the plunge and earned certification as a PTR (Professional Tennis Registry) WTA coach.

“The first day I went to do it, I cried,” Stevenson told me, referring to coaching. “Maybe some players want to be coaches, but I didn’t. I wanted to go into television, or hosting, something on the creative side. I just felt that after tennis I am not going to coach. It’s funny how God laughs at your plans.”

Wolf, the Octagon vice-president, suggests that it would be useful to go right to the source to learn why coaching hasn’t kept up with the growth and diversity seen in so many other aspects of the women’s game.

“Go back to women who played over the past 20 years and ask why they didn’t go into coaching,” she said. “That’s where you’ll start to answer that question, ‘Why there are so few top women coaches?’”

We do know that many women simply tire, like some men’s players, of the itinerant tennis lifestyle. More than men, though, women appear to see tennis as one stage of life, and “something else” as the successive one. For many, that means having a family. But given the nature and demands of the respective jobs, it would probably be even more difficult for a mother to be a coach than a player.

I think the way forward is for more players at the elite level to realize that women who played at a high level on the WTA Tour can really add a lot when it comes to understanding the culture of the tour, the pressures of being female on the tour, and all that comes with that. Pam Shriver, former doubles No. 1

Coaching in the WTA has become an unstable enterprise offering very little in the way of job security, even for the cream of the crop. The reasons for that aren’t readily apparent, but they may have something to do with personal chemistry at a time when, more than ever, women feel empowered and more willing to assert themselves (after all, they do sign the coaches’ paychecks). The trend has been towards increasingly transactional relationships between coach and player.

Thus, the WTA market has become glutted with elite male coaches for the relatively small number of top players who can afford the luxury of a dedicated coach. This buyer’s market has created an ever-accelerating game of musical coaching chairs. This clearly isn’t great for coaches, but it may also be harmful to players.

“This generation of women really relies too much on male coaches,” Stevenson says. “Even when they (the players) are doing really well, they still fire the coach. It’s because the grass is always greener.”

Shriver compares the players who hop from coach to coach to students who keep changing schools in a search for better grades.

“It’s a known fact that you don’t develop as well as a student that way,” Shriver says. “My eyes and my own sense tell me that frequent coaching changes just aren’t a good idea.”

Iga Swiatek, a three-time Grand Slam singles champion and still just 21, has had just two coaches through five years of Grand Slam play (Tomasz Wiktorowski took over from Piotr Sierzputowski early this year). Swiatek won nearly many titles in 2022 (8) as the rest of the Top Eight combined (9). And to be sure, there are exemplary, apparently long-term coaching relationships between male coaches and WTA players; Jessica Pegula and David Witt, and Maria Sakkari and Tom Hill, comprise but two.

There also have been harmful outcomes when male coaches ignore their responsibility to honor the emotional and physical boundaries that regulate their profession. Having more well-trained, elite female coaches wouldn’t automatically eliminate that problem, but it might help create a healthier workplace.

“Players have to understand that when they bring in someone to help as a trainer, a hitting partner, coach, whatever, they absolutely must keep the relationship professional,” says Shriver, who earlier this year came forward about a traumatic relationship with an older coach.

Coaching is all about the company you keep. It’s impossible to police the confidants and companions a player chooses, but it would be a step in a good direction if a star WTA player could comfortably choose a woman as her coach.