By Richard Pagliaro | @TennisNow | Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Photo credit: Tony Chang/Chang Photography
It was Coco Gauff’s coming of age tournament.
New mom Belinda Bencic stole the show.
Wild card Bencic broke in the penultimate game toppling the third-ranked Gauff 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 to reach the Indian Wells quarterfinals today.
Serving at 4-all, 40-love in the decider, Gauff squandered the lead, lost serve and ultimately the match in the following game.
The reigning WTA Finals champion committed eight double faults—13 fewer than the career-high 21 double faults she clanked in her opening-round win over Moyuka Uchijima.
Patches of erratic play off serve and forehand have plagued Gauff this season.
Afterward, Gauff said she believes she’s making strides trying to sharpen her second serve and stabilize her sometime fragile forehand, but suggested some of her practice progress isn’t translating to the match court.
Still less than five months removed from her rise to the WTA Finals championship, Gauff said she’s not beating herself up over her slow start to 2025.
“Overall, I feel like, I mean, it’s not as bad as it seems, I guess. I mean, start of the year, I did well at United Cup and lost to Paula [Badosa] fourth round in Australia,” Gauff said. “Middle East wasn’t a great swing for me. Here, I mean, I lost 6-4 in the third in the fourth round against a tough opponent who’s coming off a 500 win.
“Obviously I wanted to do better, want to have better results, but it’s not something I can crush myself on. I’m trying to do better, and that’s all I can do. I’m trying to work on things in practice, and unfortunately right now it’s not translating how I’d like to.”
At crunch time today, Bencic pounded away at Gauff’s forehand wing bleeding errors to seal her quarterfinal return.
“Yeah, I felt like she was more tense, so I felt like that was the right time to go for her forehand,” Bencic told the media in Indian Wells. “Obviously, like, it’s difficult to all the time go at one side, because I feel like if someone is not so confident on one side, the worse you can do is give them rhythm.
“But, yeah, it was an instinctive choice, and definitely feel like also a tactical thing, and I hope that the score pressure would also kind of work into her mindset a little bit of not being so confident and being a little bit tight.”
The 2023 US Open champion Gauff celebrates her 21st birthday on Thursday—a reminder that time is on her side as she strives for improvements.
Though much has been made of Gauff’s extreme western grip on her forehand, one of the issues in this tournament was her tendency to hit too many forehands open stance and off balance.
In contrast, Gauff has excellent preparation on the backhand wing, typically steps into that shot and uses larger muscle groups with her hip and shoulder rotation to really drive the ball.
Too often on the forehand, Gauff was opening up her shoulders early and brushing up on the ball.
Gauff said she’s shifted her grip slightly on serve and aims to serve more aggressively.
“We kind of changed a lot of things with the serve,” Gauff said. “I don’t want to get into specifics of it, but yeah, I mean, I went on the practice court after the first day and then after the other day.
“You know, I still think I could have served better. Was obviously more consistent, but definitely want to get more aggressive with it. It was kind of one of those things where I started the tournament not serving well, so it’s more so just trying to get it in.”
