Gauff Adds Matt Daly to Coaching Team, Vows to Focus on Serve

By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Sunday September 29, 2024

After parting ways with Brad Gilbert after a 14-month partnership that produced her maiden major title, Coco Gauff has shored up her team, adding Denis Shapovalov’s coach Matt Daly.

Gauff, who reached the round of 16 at Beijing on Sunday and is now 2-0 with Daly as her head coach, says she hopes to continue the partnership for the rest of the season and into 2025. The 20-year-old American will also continue her relationship with longtime coach Jean-Christophe Faurel.

Daly, 45, played college tennis at Notre Dame, and graduated from South Bend in 2001. He reached 941 in the ATP rankings in 2003.

Daly co-founded Grip MD along with Mark Merklein (a current co-coach of Jessica Pegula). According to Facebook he specializes in helping players make grip changes: “Since graduating, Matt has been coaching both highly ranked juniors and professionals for twenty years, specializing in technique and specifically, grip changes. Matt has also worked with multiple top 100 ATP players on grip changes.”

Gauff Targets Improved Serve

No.1 focus for sixth-ranked Gauff is to shore up the serve that plagued her during her US Open title defense. The American’s serve went off the rails during her fourth-round loss to Emma Navarro as she tossed in 19 double-faults in her second consecutive loss to her rival.

“There are other parts of my game that I want to work on, too, but the focus right now is the serve,” Gauff told WTA Insider Courtney Nguyen this week. “When I serve well, I play pretty well. For me, that’s the basis for my game.”

Gauff says the changes will be subtle, rather than drastic.

“Already, the little bit we’ve done has made a drastic improvement to where I was three weeks ago,” she said. “At this point, there’s not a crazy amount, like going through a whole technique change or resetting everything. It’s just subtle things that, doing it for a week now, will help me.”

Gauff will face either Naomi Osaka or Katie Volynets in the round of 16 at Beijing.