Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.
This week, exhibitions took over what we’re calling the off-season even as the WTA Tour plays on. Patrick Mouratoglou can’t stop branding academies with a big M, Jessica Pegula says injuries have actually helped her and Belinda Bencic is on the comeback trail.
Will Patrick Mouratoglou take over the shiny tennis academy world?
Since 1996, coach, would-be-tennis disruptor and general impresario Patrick Mouratoglou has operated one of the world’s premier tennis academies in the south of France. Now he is opening an academy in one of the world’s hottest tennis hotbeds: the U.S. state of Florida.
The Mouratoglou Academy Zephyrhills will be located at what used to be the Sarah Vande Berg Tennis and Wellness Center in central Florida, 30 miles northeast of Tampa and 80 miles southwest of Orlando. Mouratoglou has other academies in Nice, France; Atlanta, Ga. and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is also planning to open a facility in Melbourne, Australia in 2027.
The big selling point is, as always, the Mouratoglou sheen, given his association with Serena Williams during some of her best years, Coco Gauff, who trained in France at his academy when she was 10, Holger Rune and Stefanos Tsitsipas. He is currently coaching four-time Grand Slam champion Naomi Osaka. In a statement, Mouratoglou called the Zephyrhills venture “the latest and grandest effort in our planned expansion into the United States market”.
It follows sports management giant IMG’s sale of its famed academy in Florida, which started the whole tennis academy concept in the mid-1970s.
Coaching legend Nick Bollettieri gathered some top players and housed and trained them in Longboat Key, just south of Tampa. IMG does still have some clients who train at the academy, but in recent years it has stopped serving future professional stars and functioned more as a high-performance prep school for college prospects in tennis and other sports.
That has created an opportunity for Mouratoglou and others to move into the ultra-high-performance space with what he says will be a hyper-personalized approach to training. Now he just has to produce.
He was all over tennis this week too: Australian Alex de Minaur won over $798,000 (£625,000) at the Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS) final in London, Mouratoglou’s new-age vision for tennis. The man himself? In Los Angeles with Osaka.
Belinda Bencic’s next comeback?
In early 2017, Swiss player Belinda Bencic became the first teenager to reach the WTA top 10 since Caroline Wozniacki did it eight years earlier, largely on the back of winning the 2016 Canadian Open by beating six top-25 players, including Serena Williams and Simona Halep. Then came a wrist injury, surgery, and a precipitous drop into the far reaches of the world rankings.
Bencic was not deterred.
She came back from No. 312 in September that year to make the top 50 by Wimbledon 2018, and ended up going as high as No. 4 by 2020, while winning Olympic gold in singles the following year in the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics.
In 2023, Bencic, then No. 13 in the world, lost in the fourth round of the U.S. Open. She didn’t play again that year, announced in the November that she was pregnant and gave birth to daughter Bella in April.
Just over one year on from that announcement, the 27-year-old is No. 481 in the world, but that’s an improvement, having been No. 913 before she made a run to the final at the WTA 125 event last week in the French city of Angers, where she lost to American Alycia Parks. Bencic reached the doubles final there too, with compatriot Celine Naef, and told the crowd “I missed this” before that match.
How high will she go in 2025?
How getting injured can be a blessing
Jessica Pegula said something pretty strange last week in New York, where she was playing an exhibition event at Madison Square Garden against Emma Navarro.
“Getting hurt was probably the best thing for me in a way,” the 2024 U.S. Open finalist said during a small roundtable with journalists ahead of the event. “Sometimes, I need something to tell me to stop.”
Pegula was out from mid-April to mid-June. She missed the French Open, one of the year’s four Grand Slams. Hardly ideal. But then she returned for the grass-court season with enough gas in the tank for the rest of the year, winning the WTA 1000 tournament in Toronto for a second year running and making the finals in Cincinnati and then at Flushing Meadows.
Aryna Sabalenka’s team has said as much about her season, too. The best thing that happened to her was an injury that forced her to skip Wimbledon and rest for a month ahead of the North American hard-court swing. She would beat Pegula in the Cincinnati and U.S. Open finals and finished as the year-end world No. 1. Sabalenka’s coach, Anton Dubrov, said she also benefited from homeland Belarus being barred from the Billie Jean King Cup because its support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But if players have to get hurt at some point in the year to be able to produce their best during the season’s final four months, does that not mean there is a problem with the length of the tennis calendar or with how it is organized?
Shot of the week
De Minaur deceives the deceiver-in-chief, Alexander Bublik.
🏆 The winners of the week
🎾 WTA
🏆 Alycia Parks (3) def. Belinda Bencic 7-6(4), 3-6, 6-0 to win the Open Angers Loire (125) in Angers, France. It is the American’s fifth WTA 125 singles title.
🏆 Maja Chwalinska (7) def. Ylena In-Albon 6-1, 6-2 to win the Mundotenis Open (125) in Florianopolis, Brazil. It is the Pole’s first WTA 125 singles title.
📈📉 On the rise / Down the line
📈 Parks moves up 19 places from No. 103 to No. 84 after her title in France.
📈 Bencic rises 432 spots from No. 913 to No. 481 after her run to that final against Parks as she comes back after having a baby in April.
📅 Coming up
🎾 WTA
📍Limoges, France: Open BLS de Limoges (125) featuring Ekaterina Alexandrova, Dayana Yastremska, Anna Blinkova, Elena-Gabriela Ruse.
📺
Tell us what you noticed this week in tennis in the comments below.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, sports business, Women’s Tennis
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