Marta Kostyuk, the rising tennis star from Ukraine, does not mask her thoughts or emotions.
So when you ask her if having a female coach brings any specific advantages, she gives you this quick jerk of her head. Her voice adopts a certain tone and pitch. She is making it very clear that, in this moment, she thinks you are an idiot.
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“It’s just more relatable,” she says — a concise, cordial explanation, even as you can see “DUH!!!” appear in a cartoon word bubble above her head.
But then she does what she nearly always does, whether she is talking about the war in her country and what it’s like to have to check her phone as soon as she wakes up in the morning to see if any family members have been killed, or how she won or lost a particular point or game or match. She pauses, and then she goes deeper, trying to explain how she has come to believe what she does about women being able to offer something a man never could to a female player.
“Women are a bit more flexible,” she says and to her, it’s no accident, because they have to be. “Women are born with the thing in their body to give birth and grow the population. You need to be adaptable. You need to know how to adjust because you need to bring another life to this world. It’s something inside of all women, to be more flexible, more adaptable, more understanding, more emotional.”
This is why, when the 21-year-old looks over at her box in the middle of a match, she sees the steadying presence of Sandra Zaniewska, who has become a kind of tennis soulmate in the past nine months. “She’s like my twin 10 years younger,” Zaniewska said of Kostyuk during a recent interview.
Female coaches will enjoy one of their best spotlights this weekend, when the qualification matches for the Billie Jean King Cup take place at eight locations throughout the world. Lindsay Davenport, the former world No. 1, will make her debut coaching the Americans in a tricky matchup with Belgium, taking over for Kathy Rinaldi. Ai Sugiyama, a former top 10 player, will lead Naomi Osaka and Japan against Kazakhstan, while Anne Keothavong marshals Great Britain against France, who beat them in 2023. Sam Stosur leads Australia against Mexico.
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Still, that is only four of the 16 teams in action this weekend, a sign of just how slim the pickings are if a female player wants another woman to guide her through the rigors of the tennis season. Just five percent of the women’s field at last year’s Wimbledon had a female coach, and Zaniewska, who is 32 years old, is one of just a handful of female coaches on the professional tennis tour, though their ranks have been inching upwards of late.
When her new charge faced Katie Boulter, the British No. 1, in the final of the San Diego Open last month, it was a rare duel with a title on the line between two players with female coaches, with Biljana Veselinovic, a veteran coach from Serbia, supporting Boulter.
The full-time position requires being on the road for 20 or 30 weeks a year, and perhaps another few weeks during the brief off-season in November and December. That doesn’t make for a particularly family-friendly work environment, which veterans of the tennis world say is the biggest obstacle to bringing more women into the coaching ranks, especially former players who often start families when their careers end, usually in their late twenties or early and mid-thirties.
“I imagine that if I had a family and kids, I would not be here at all,” Zaniewska said. “I wouldn’t even want to be here. So I understand.”
But things are on the up.
With her kids morphing from high school to young adulthood, 22-time Grand Slam doubles champion Pam Shriver has helped coach Donna Vekic of Croatia for the past year and a half. She said there’s even a growing WhatsApp group in which the top female coaches share tips, professional chatter, and point each other to helpful research.
Its dozen-or-so members include Judy Murray, the mother and O.G. coach of a couple of pretty good brothers named Andy and Jamie, and Conchita Martinez, the first Spaniard to win Wimbledon, in 1994, who coached fellow Wimbledon champ and compatriot Garbine Muguruza and now works with Czech Marie Bouzkova.
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“If you’d tried to have a WhatsApp group of female coaches a few years ago, it probably would have had just two or three members,” Shriver said.
They also discuss the physical and mental realities of the game that only women, whether player or coach, have to deal with. Like Kostyuk and Zaniewska, Shriver has no doubt about the mutual added value that a female presence can provide, especially when it comes to the emotional and physical ups and downs that women have to deal with and men do not.
In recent times, world No 1 Iga Swiatek has openly discussed how premenstrual syndrome (PMS) derails her form and mental control on court, while Zheng Qinwen had a real chance of a famous victory against Swiatek at Roland Garros in 2022, before severe menstrual cramps ended her hopes. Qinwen bluntly said that she wished she “could be a man” after the match, in contrast to the feeling that she had to euphemize what ended her run at a Grand Slam tournament as “girl things”.
“I don’t know any female tennis players that haven’t had issues with managing their menstrual cycle and figuring out a way to compete at their best level at all times,” Shriver said.
It’s impossible to know how many of the vaguely described injuries that force women to default matches are attributable to their monthly cycles or other complications of their reproductive system. Danielle Collins battled heavy, painful periods for years before she was finally diagnosed with endometriosis, a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus. Collins, who is 30, had surgery but plans to retire at the end of this season partly because she wants to start a family and endometriosis can make it difficult to become pregnant. She is playing the best tennis of her career. Men keep asking her if she is sure about quitting. Women, not so much.
It’s worth noting the difficulty of delving further into the differences between male and female coaches without falling into some cultural stereotypes, specifically the common generalization that women are more emotional and sensitive than men. Everyone does it — Shriver, Kostyuk, Zaniewska, even Katrina Adams, the former player who became the president of the United States Tennis Association and a vice president of the International Tennis Federation.
There are female coaches who struggle with empathy, and sensitive, emotional and flexible male coaches. Also, some female coaches specialize in tough love, while some male coaches can offer a good shoulder to cry on. For Zaniewska, who is from Poland, a belief that her gender could offer some kind of unique understanding did not accelerate her journey into coaching. She became a coach almost by accident, at 24, when her longtime friend Petra Martic of Croatia asked her for help.
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At the time, Zaniewska’s playing career had stalled. She was battling injuries and couldn’t get her ranking out of the triple digits. She needed help for herself as much as Martic needed it of her, so she agreed to help the Croat for a few weeks, figuring she would mostly be a hitting partner.
Martic told Zaniewska she liked how she saw and talked about tennis as an extension of the self, a form of identity, and encouraged her to play as creatively as she could. Then Martic asked her to be her full-time coach.
Zaniewska told her that was a crazy idea. She knew nothing about organizing a schedule and guiding a player through a season.
No problem, Martic told her. They could figure that part out. “I trust you,” she said.
Zaniewska worked with Martic for two years. Her ranking shot up from 90 to 14. Zaniewska, who found a similar adrenaline coaching as she did when she played, had proven her value.
She then spent a year coaching the French veteran Alize Cornet and worked as the director of high performance at Patrick Mouratoglou’s academy in southern France. But she knew that if the right opportunity with the right player came along, someone with a chance to be one of the very best, she would jump at it.
Last June, she was vacationing in London during Wimbledon when Kostyuk’s agent, Caroline Ebner, reached out to see if she might be interested in working with Kostyuk.
Here was that opportunity.
“An unbelievable athlete,” Zaniewska said of Kostyuk. “She has the passion, the emotions, great serve. She returns very well. She can hit the ball. She can slide. She can come to the net. Drop shot. What doesn’t she have?” Off-court, Zaniewska saw someone who shares her passions for the mind-body connection, the psychology that drives their lives on and off the court, plus the intricacies of finance and investments that are key to building a sustainable life after tennis, as much as a career.
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Days later, over breakfast in London, she asked Kostyuk a series of questions that go a long way toward explaining her approach to coaching.
She asked Kostyuk why she plays tennis. What does she like about it? What are her goals? What does she see as her identity as a tennis player? What does she need? What is she looking for in a coach?
All this was familiar to Kostyuk, whose mother had been her main coach through her childhood and during some more recent times but she returned to Ukraine last year.
As they began to work together, first during a 10-day training segment and then hitting the road for two and a half months on the North American and Asian swings, Zaniewska coaxed Kostyuk to lean into parts of her tennis personality and her game that other coaches (OK, male coaches) had tried to stifle.
Kostyuk is an emotional and passionate person, so it makes sense that she is emotional and passionate on the tennis court, rather than striving for steely serenity. Also, that creativity and variety in her game are a part of who she is. So don’t snuff it out and turn the game into big serves and thumping forehands. Most importantly, she told her, some days, she isn’t going to feel that great about grinding through another training session or be satisfied with the level she might bring to a second-round match in a random tournament. It’s OK.
So is a woman more likely to accept that than a man, and more likely to understand what might be driving the emotions? Or is that one of those unavoidable stereotypes, seeded with truth but more harmful than helpful in talking about such an individual relationship between player and coach?
“There are just more mood swings,” Zaniewska explained. “And for me, it’s like, ‘OK, it’s not a big deal. We all have better and worse days in a way, and it’s fine’. Marta doesn’t need to be happy and smiling every day.”
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As long as they are doing good work and generally having fun, despite moments that are less than fun, all is well. Moodiness is fine. “With these things, I’m just a little bit more easy going, because I’ve gone through them and I’ve been through them myself. I’m used to it. It’s normal.”
For Kostyuk, the freedom to feel whatever she feels has been liberating. Kostyuk actually lost six of her first 15 matches with her new coach, but she didn’t care. She had a wing-woman who understood her.
“It was just pure,” she said.
Now, Kostyuk is off to the best season of her career during one of the most challenging periods of her life – a quarter-finalist at the Australian Open, a semi-finalist at Indian Wells. She lost that final in San Diego to Boulter, having been up a set before losing the next two 6-2, 6-2. Zaniewska said Kostyuk may have let her desire to win overcome her and lost her focus. When it was over, she and Zaniewska jumped in a car and drove out to the desert for the start of Indian Wells. For 48 hours, on the road through the arid landscape, morning and night, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, they didn’t talk about the match at all. Then they got on a court just outside Palm Springs, turned to each other, and talked things through.
It wasn’t planned that way. Zaniewska just had a sense that it was the right time.
(Top photo: Robert Prange/Getty Images)
