Earlier this summer, Coco Gauff was in New York and in need of some inspiration.
As reigning U.S. Open champion, she and the tennis world had high expectations for her title defense. But in the build-up tournaments for the fourth and final major of the year, she had gotten into a rut. She lost in the third round at the Canadian Open in Toronto, then was beaten in her opening match at the Cincinnati Open, a tournament she won last year via a rare victory over world No. 1 Iga Swiatek in the semifinals.
In her search for motivation and belief, she ended up turning to an unlikely, but very familiar platform: TikTok. Gauff, who has almost 730,000 followers on the social-media platform, needed just one comment from a fan to turn her mindset around.
“It said, ‘You’ve won, literally and figuratively. Why stress yourself out over a victory lap?’,” Gauff explained at a news conference just before the tournament at Flushing Meadows. “That’s actually a good perspective. No one can take that from me, so why stress myself over something that I already have.”
The 20-year-old home favorite didn’t retain her title in the end, losing to compatriot Emma Navarro in a fourth-round match laden with double faults, but she did repeat the mantra on several occasions throughout the tournament.
Tennis’ relationship with social media has come a long way since Serena Williams, one of its truest icons, started a Facebook page in 2008. Gauff is just one of a whole generation of players who are fully tuned into platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube. They use them to have fun and to connect with each other and with fans — and to post their heartfelt comments when legends of the game quit, with a roll call of the great and the good of sport thumbing out well wishes to Rafael Nadal upon his retirement announcement this week.
These platforms also have a greater purpose, more aligned with the cultural context of tennis. Players are using them to create engaging content that doesn’t just offer a window into their lives on and off the court, but also brings new fans to the sport, regardless of whether they follow an individual star on the court or not. For some casual fans, tennis players spend most of the year outside Grand Slam tournaments as creators who play tennis.
Belgian player Zizou Bergs is 25 years old. He only moved inside the men’s top 100 for the first time this spring, but his 75,000 followers hang off his glimpses inside life lower down the ATP rankings, as well as videos that play off trends or sounds on the app. This reshaping of tennis using the forms and visual languages of social media apps has been a growth area for tournaments in recent years, with the official U.S. Open TikTok being particularly freewheeling in its portrayal of a sport that can often give off a self-serious impression.
Bergs says that embracing social media is vital to sustaining the breadth of tennis’ appeal. “I’m a real GenZ-er,” he said in an interview conducted at the U.S. Open. “TikTok is a little bit younger, and eventually, they (its users) are going to grow up. They come to these tournaments and they will remember one of the first tennis players they saw.”
Daria Kasatkina, the current world No. 11, is one of the architects of content creation in tennis.
Her YouTube vlog, “What the Vlog,” which she co-hosts with her girlfriend, the former figure-skating champion Natalia Zabiiako, offers a behind-the-curtain look at their lives, and is admirably lacking in veneer when the realities of being a travelling tennis player get less glossy. A vlog from Berlin is entitled, “BERLIN. TOURNAMENT WITHOUT IMPROVEMENT,” with “WORST TOURNAMENT?” in the thumbnail.
What started as a 28-minute video of Kasatkina and Zabiiako in the Maldives is now a weekly long-form video — sometimes running over an hour — posted to a channel with over 55,000 subscribers. Kasatkina and Zabiiako capture footage from 250-level WTA events up to 1000s and the Grand Slams, and Kasatkina interviews players at some of their most disarming moments, whether after practice hits or when walking around venues; Gauff appeared in her episode from Indian Wells, Calif. and she shared espressos with two-time Grand Slam finalist Jasmine Paolini during a vlog from the Italian Open.
Kasatkina, 27, saw there weren’t players on tour creating this type of content in the past. The biggest stars in tennis and statesmen and stateswomen of the game do have massive social media presences — Roger Federer: 13 million on Instagram; Serena Williams: 17m — but they are often as stage-managed as their public appearances.
“People know us only from the picture on TV,” Kasatkina said in an interview in New York during the U.S. Open. “Outside the court, nobody knows us. To open up a little bit, to show who we are in the normal life, I think it’s very nice.”
Naomi Osaka, a four-time Grand Slam champion, does this with some of her social media posts which are in the form of notes. On April 26, she posted on X: “Ngl (not gonna lie) guys I think I’m on to something. It’s all about to click, I feel it in the air.”
On August 13, Osaka wrote a lengthy post on Instagram, pouring out her thoughts on the state of her game. “My biggest issue currently isn’t losses though, my biggest issue is that I don’t feel like I’m in my body,” Osaka said.
Osaka believes these posts help her, as it informs the public of her feelings. “It’s like speaking your words into the universe and letting them go,” she said in a New York news conference. “After you see it, you’re kind of just free from the thoughts that muddle your mind.”
Some players choose to directly interact with fans from the jump.
Canadian Leylah Fernandez, the 2021 U.S. Open finalist, hosted a Q&A, where fans asked her questions and she posted the answers on her Instagram story. She discussed with her team earlier this year how to connect with her fans more, and the 22-year-old said that she tries to do Instagram Live as much as possible after her matches.
Barbora Krejcikova is also a fan of the Q&A format. During a rain delay for one of her Wimbledon matches, the 28-year-old Czech was staying at her place, five minutes from the All England Club. Waiting for the weather to improve and trying to pass the time, Krejcikova posted on X: “Rain Delay. So let’s do a Q&A.” She received 341 replies.
“I was surprised how many people asked me questions,” Krejcikova told reporters at the U.S. Open. “It was very nice from them.”
Krejcikova’s purpose for doing that Q&A was to help fans get to know more about her, as she isn’t as extroverted a person. Read the answers and you learn Krejcikova is OK with pineapple on pizza, takes no milk in her tea and that Nadal is her dream doubles partner. Krejcikova eventually won Wimbledon in July, and she did a Q&A again before the U.S. Open began the following month.
Then, she went on a bad run, losing her second match in New York and then her first at subsequent events in Beijing and Wuhan in China. The negative posts on X started, all around a similar theme, which one post laid out simply. “How did Barbora Krejcikova win Wimbledon,” it said.
“I won 7 matches in a row. That’s how,” she replied.
I won 7 matches in a row. That’s how. 🤗
— Barbora Krejcikova (@BKrejcikova) October 10, 2024
There is a cost to reaching fans on social media, whether for players who keep things light-hearted or those who share posts that are more vulnerable. The ease of connection can quickly create problems, and players — particularly ones who lose, and particularly those who are beaten in matches people have placed bets on — can receive torrents of online abuse.
On the first Wednesday of the U.S. Open, Caroline Garcia, who hosts her “Tennis Insider Club” podcast, where she interviews past and present players, posted the hateful messages she received after losing her first-round match to Renata Zarazua.
In a post on X, the 30-year-old Frenchwoman said these comments hurt, even as a veteran on the WTA Tour, and expressed worry for the younger generation of players who may not be fully equipped to deal with that kind of situation.
This are some of the messages I received lately after loosing some matches. Just a few of them. There’s hundreds. And now, being 30 years old, although they still hurt, because at the end of the day, I’m just a normal girl working really hard and trying my best, I have tools and… pic.twitter.com/q4djrfLfx9
— Caroline Garcia (@CaroGarcia) August 28, 2024
“We are humans,” Garcia said. “And sometimes, when we receive these messages we are already emotionally destroyed after a tough loss. And they can be damaging.”
Frances Tiafoe says he’s dealt with hurtful comments for a long time. He doesn’t get bothered with the vitriol. Tiafoe understands that negativity will always follow players, as long as they are public figures in the sport. It followed him again this month, after he unleashed a string of cursing of his own at an umpire after a contentious time violation call. Tiafoe, who later used social media to apologize for his behavior, is waiting to see what his punishment will be.
“Be more upset about the loss or tough time you’re actually going through and don’t let your mood get even worse from people you don’t know or care about,” Tiafoe said in a news conference in New York.
Gauff has a simpler and quicker solution — the block button.
“I will literally spend 30 minutes blocking people,” Gauff said, but she is also unafraid to be more direct about what she perceives as unconsidered negativity from online “haters”. While she doesn’t check X much and limits her Instagram usage, she will use a so-called burner phone, or anonymous accounts, to search for non-tennis content — or her own, to directly call out something she takes issue with.
After she won the WTA 1000 title in Beijing last week, she posted an Instagram Story, mocking the idea that she only wins 250-level tournaments (the lowest classification of events on the WTA Tour.) An X user reposted it, saying she had the mentality of a five-year-old.
Gauff took it as a compliment.
honestly kids have the best out look on life. they are so positive and creative. so I’ll take it❤️ my goal this tournament was to play and enjoy tennis as much as I did when I was a kid because that’s when life was/is the most fun!
— Coco Gauff (@CocoGauff) October 6, 2024
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