Almost every morning, Cori “Coco” Gauff practices on the tennis courts of Pompey Park in Delray Beach. For a player who just became the fifth-youngest winner of the French Open girls’ tournament, the practice is more low key than you might expect.
There are just four people on the court: Coco; her dad and coach, Corey; her mom, Candi; and her hitting partner, Gaston Murray.
At 14, a lot of promising young tennis players would be playing at big academies. Any of these places would welcome Coco with open arms — she’s ranked third in the ITF world junior tennis rankings.
But Corey and Candi aren’t very keen on academies. They’ve seen greedy coaches and overbearing parents, and they prefer to keep it within the family. So far, the decision has paid off.
At 13, Coco was the youngest girl to make a U.S. Open girls final, she won the 12 & Under Junior Orange Bowl title in 2016 and the 8-year-old “Little Mo” Tournament title in 2012. She trained with Serena Williams’ coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, in Nice, France.
The four French Open girls’ winners who were younger than Coco — Martina Hingis, Jennifer Capriati, Hingis again and Gabriela Sabatini — went on to combine to win nine grand slam titles. Most players would be elated to follow in those footsteps. However, it might not be enough for Coco, who says she wants to be the best ever.
For now, though, she’s taking things one step at a time.
“I think that I’ve always done a good job of staying focused right now, because if you get your head big, then you’re not gonna get any better,” Coco said. “So I try to stay humble, and just focus on training and getting better.”
Obviously, you can credit some of Coco’s success to her raw talent.
“Her talent, I’d say, is off the charts for her age,” said Murray, who has hit with the likes of Venus Williams and Naomi Osaka. “There’s not a lot of people I can name in the past that have come up like her, besides the Williams sisters. If people, if they know tennis, are familiar with Martina Hingis. That’s the closest thing I can come up with. But she’s definitely one of a kind, and I can see in these two or three years, give her time, and she’s gonna be just as good.”
Another reason for Coco’s success is her meticulous and competitive nature. She keeps her own schedule and gets upset when it’s change. There’s also her goal of being the greatest of all time.
“She has this uncanny determination,” Corey said. “[Candi] tells the story of [Coco] running around the track with her older cousins when she was 3 or 4 years old, and she wouldn’t stop and she kept running, and she was crying because she couldn’t catch them. And I’m like, ‘Man, this is gonna be interesting. She’s got some kind of determination.’ ”
Corey speaks about it with some surprise. But in an honest moment, he’ll tell you he knows exactly where those traits come from.
In the family
Candi and Corey each grew up in Delray Beach.
Corey lived a street away from Pompey Park. He played any and every sport he could growing up and at Spanish River High School, but eventually settled on basketball and played at Georgia State.
Candi grew up a gymnast and a track star, although she eventually gave up gymnastics when her parents wouldn’t allow her to move for training. She focused on track and field, she was named the Sun Sentinel’s Track Athlete of the Year for Palm Beach County two years in a row and earned her way onto Florida State’s team.
“Track and field was a second love,” Candi said. “Gymnastics was [my] first. But what overshadows everything is the love of competing. So no matter what I was going to do, I was going to try and do my best in it, because I just like to compete.”
When Coco was born they got her involved with sports at an early age. It was around the time she was in second grade and the family was living in Atlanta that Corey and Candi knew they were going to have to commit to tennis full-time if they wanted to give Coco a chance to reach her potential.
“[Corey] said to me, he was like, ‘If we’re gonna do this, she’s gonna have to home-school,’ ” Candi said. “And that meant that was my last year teaching. And I said, ‘OK, well, give it a year.’ And we moved into my parents’ home and came here.”
It was a risky move, but Candi remembered her experience with gymnastics and didn’t want to hold Coco back from her own dreams.
Eventually, Corey and Candi got a house of their own in Delray Beach with Coco and their son, Codey. It was smaller than their place in Atlanta, but they knew that if Coco was as good as they thought she was, the tournaments and traveling would cost money, which would require cutbacks in other parts of their life.
Then Corey left his job to coach Coco full time. By this time, they’d had another son, Cameron, and Corey admits it was a financial strain, joking that they went from being a “single-income family” to a “no-income family.”
It was all part of the greater plan for Coco’s growth as a tennis player.
Coach and dad
Corey and Coco’s on-court relationship started out great. But as Coco got older, the two began to butt heads.
“When we were younger, it was pretty easy,” Coco said. “And then when I turned, I would say, 12 or 13, we used to argue, because he used to be annoying because he would bring tennis home, and he’s always around me. So now we talked, and we understand each other now more.”
That’s only one aspect of how Corey has had to improve as a coach. His playing experience is limited to a few years in middle school, when he says he got really in to tennis.
But he’s studied to learn the ins and outs of the game since Coco has picked it up. And when he needs help, he seeks out elite coaches in the area, or even Mouratoglou in France.
As for the emotional side of things, he relies on Candi to help him out. She calls herself a helicopter mom, but qualifies that, saying “I do let [my kids] do a lot of stuff, but I just have to know.”
She now functions as mediator for Coco and Corey sometimes.
“There was a breaking point, and I stopped it and went to the center of the court and said, ‘This is Switzerland. This is where, if you have a problem, you come here and discuss it.’ ” Candi said.
Now that Coco and her father understand each other better, her improvement has been steady and positive. Corey sees a huge difference just from where she was last year, and Coco’s French Open win was a bit of a turning point for her.
She had success in past tournaments, but on the grandest stages, she had a tendency to cry if she got frustrated. It’s not abnormal behavior for a girl in a high-pressure situation — Coco says she wasn’t the only one who did it — but it was something that would eventually have to change.
In the French Open final, against Caty McNally, Coco got smoked in the first set 6-1. Then she fell behind 2-0 in the second. It would have been easy for her to give in to frustration, and it would have been hard to blame her.
Instead, Coco battled back to win the second set 6-3, then overcame a 3-0 deficit in the third set to win 7-6 (7-1), clinching the girls’ singles title. She screamed, threw her racket and fell to the famous red clay at Roland Garros.
Family and a fish fry
On this day at her hometown park, less than a week after the French Open, Coco practices defending passing shots against Murray — she struggled with that against McNally. Corey coaches and facilitates the practice. Candi watches from the side, quietly talking about her family and Delray Beach.
Coco practices here whenever she’s home. She groans and looks at Corey when she misses a shot.
After practice, the family is holding a celebratory fish fry for Coco. Candi knowingly laughs when she talks about it, because they had to run the timing past Coco first to make sure it was OK.
“It gets tiring sometimes,” Coco says after practice. “But I try to schedule it so I have time to chill. Usually like the afternoons, around 4, I finish practice at like 3:30, so I don’t have anything to do besides school occasionally. Usually I try to do school right after my first morning practice. So around 4, and usually around 6, that’s when my brothers come home from practice, that’s when I try to have everything done.”
Coco can go anywhere from here. She could falter and become another successful junior player who couldn’t cut it in the pros. Or, if Corey’s senses are right, she can continue to grow and reach toward her ultimate goal.
“It’s what I call a big, hairy, audacious goal that you set up there.” Corey said. “… At the end of the day, I’m not gonna be a dream killer. My kid wants to be great. Who does anything without wanting to be great?”
According to Corey, the Gauffs have gotten some negative comments about Coco’s ambitions. But those people are misconstruing Coco’s words. She doesn’t think it will be easy, she just doesn’t want to limit herself.
So for now, working one day at a time means continuing to play in smaller, amateur tournaments and try to qualify for the professional tournaments when she can.
It’s a slow process, and the Gauffs aren’t trying to rush it.
“We’re not in a hurry or anything like that,” Corey said. “Tennis is pretty much a merit system. I mean you’ve got to beat somebody, and if you keep beating people, you keep getting points and accumulating a ranking, and there’s no way really to know, other than you put them in a tournament and see how they do. You just keep trying to improve your game.”
Saturday morning, all five of the Gauffs — Codey and Cameron too — will head to Baton Rouge for Coco’s next tournament. It’s unusual they can all attend a tournament together, and they’re excited about that.
She’s considered the possibility of failure. She’s considered what life at public school might have been like. But she doesn’t worry about any of it. There are fish fries and tournaments to go to with her family.
“I mean, I’m really happy with what I’m doing right now,” she said.
