"Trust and accelerate" is Coco Gauff’s mantra of the moment

For the first 45 minutes of her second-round match on Friday, Coco Gauff may have looked down at the other end of the court and seen the player she wished she could be.

Never mind that the person she saw there, her old junior-days friend Hailey Baptiste, is ranked 67 spots behind her and has 11 fewer titles. It was Baptiste who was doing all the things that Gauff has been trying to do over the past two years.

She was snapping her first serves into the corners. She was following them with smoothly struck inside-out forehands hit with enough pace and topspin to rival the best male players. There were no hitches in Baptiste’s swing, no “decels”—tennis lingo for deceleration—in her service motion, both of which have long plagued Gauff. Anyone who didn’t follow tennis, and who saw Baptiste comfortably win the first set 6-3, might have thought she was the No. 3 seed, rather than Gauff.

“She was dictating a lot, especially on her forehand side,” Gauff said of that opening set. “I was just trying my best to neutralize that.”

I feel like I’m working on the right things. Now it’s just trying to, I guess, erase old demons and actually do it.

In the end, though, it was the neutralizer, not the dictator, who advanced. Gauff hit her serve five m.p.h. slower, had 12 fewer winners and six more double faults, and wasn’t as smooth or as penetrating from the forehand side. But she was the one who served up a bagel in the second set, and won the match 3-6, 6-0, 6-3.

“I thought I served better in the second and third set, got more first serves in,” she said of how she turned it around, “Overall I think just trying to put her on the back foot and not me being on the back foot.”

Gauff won the way she has always won. By running, by making fewer errors (22 to Baptiste’s 38), by attacking with her backhand, by understanding that her 70th-ranked opponent wasn’t likely to sustain her early high level for the entire match. Gauff had six double faults, but she still ended up winning 83 percent of her first-serve points. And at 30-30 late in the third, trying to hold onto serve and close it out, Gauff finished the rally with an inside-out forehand winner of her own. Her game will always have its unorthodoxies, but she has her own proven formula for winning.

None of that, of course, is going to put an end to the intense scrutiny that her game has undergone over the past six months. Few shots by a top player have been as discussed and dissected as meticulously as Gauff’s serve. And it doesn’t end there. Once she puts her serve in, all eyes go to her sometimes-funky forehand. Finally, when the match is over, she has to give the press an update on how her game felt today.

To her credit, she seems to know that Rome won’t be built in a day, and that even multiple double faults can be overcome. The early part of her motion already looks smoother than it did last fall.

“I think at this point I have the right motion,” Gauff said after beating Baptiste. “I feel like I’m working on the right things. Now it’s just trying to, I guess, erase old demons and actually do it.”

“There was moments today I was definitely nervous, and I felt like I’m getting better with each match dealing with that on those pressure moments.”

Gauff also says she has discovered one of tennis’s great paradoxes: When you hit with topspin, the faster you swing, the safer your shot will be. It’s as true for the forehand as it is for the serve.

As one legendary player—Andre Agassi?—put it: “Racquet-head speed is your friend.”

This isn’t an easy concept to embrace. The normal reaction is to think that slower means safer, and that can be true if you’re hitting flat. But with topspin, you need to go all in. Two years ago, Gauff tried to up the pace on her forehand by flattening it out; now she sees that she can hit with more power without sacrificing spin. In fact, one is essential to the other.

“For me, I just felt like I had to hit flatter to hit bigger,” she says. “And I think I realized that that’s just maybe not the game style that I can play, given the way my strokes are.”

“I’ve always thought for some reason in my head that hitting shape was more defensive, and I realized that you can be really offensive and aggressive hitting with shape,” says Gauff, using “shape” to mean spin and arc.

The biggest change for Gauff in 2026, she says, is “just trusting and accelerating.”

Gauff feels the need for speed. She’ll want to generate even more of it in the coming days. She’ll play Grand Slam finalist Karolina Muchova next, and the winner of that match could face Mirra Andreeva.

The old Coco is 4-0 vs. Muchova and 4-0 vs. Andreeva. But they’re both too good to stay winless against her forever. Which means the 2026 Coco may about to get the first real test of what she’s learned, and how much she trusts it.