Teen tennis phenom Cori “Coco” Gauff set off alarm bells when she said on Friday she was “very depressed” a couple of years ago while experiencing success at the sport.
Gauff, 16, revealed in a telling social media post that she nearly stepped away from the game just before she rocketed into orbit as a record-setting teen who defeated her idol, Venus Williams, at Wimbledon in 2019.
In a message penned for “Behind the Racquet” that Gauff reposted for her nearly 700K Instagram followers, Gauff indicated she was in a dark place trying to live up to expectations. She also said she was not prepared to reconcile the peripheral things that came with instant fame.
“Throughout my life, I was always the youngest to do things, which added hype that I didn’t want. It added this pressure that I needed to do well fast. Once I let that all go, that’s when I started to have the results I wanted,” Gauff wrote.
“Going back to around 2017-18, I was struggling to figure out if this was really what I wanted. I always had the results, so that wasn’t the issue. I just found myself not enjoying what I loved,” Gauff added. “I realized I needed to start playing for myself and not other people. For about a year I was really depressed. That was the toughest year for me so far.”
The struggle was real “right before” Wimbledon last year.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B–kAqng-fo/?utm_source=ig_embed
Gauff’s parents, Corey and Candi Gauff, told the New York Times that success over older girls in the junior tournaments created unwanted tensions and a solitary existence on the girl’s tennis tour.
“That led to loneliness at the tournaments, which leads to sadness, so for a period of time she was unhappy,” Candi Gauff told the Times on Saturday. “I don’t want to say the word ‘jealousy,’ but it was a spirit of, ‘Why is this young girl winning?’ So she was isolated.”
Flip the page to see what Gauff’s father saw in his daughter at this critica,l life-changing juncture in her life.
