Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka meet at a tennis coaches meeting in Beijing

The “other type” theory of coaches is a sporting truism.

A team that loses more than it wins with a so-called “player-coach,” someone who specializes in handling the athletes and creating a relaxed atmosphere, will often replace them with a disciplinarian. Reserved coaches who don't succeed are being replaced by energetic, emotional types who place a high value on motivation. The bookworm that focuses on the “X’s” and “O” comes back when that act wears off.

It's no different with tennis players, the most recent cases being Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka dueled on Tuesday in Beijing at the penultimate WTA 1000 tournament of the year.

Both players entered the year with high hopes, but were unable to fulfill them. After the early elimination from the US Open – Gauff lost in the fourth round, Osaka in the second – both announced coaching changes.

Gauff fired Brad Gilbert, one of the sport's greatest figures. He is an ESPN commentator and former coach of Andy Roddick and Andre Agassi, with a major unifying theory of tennis, also known as “Winning Ugly.” Gauff then brought in Matt Daly, a little-known grip specialist, to work with Jean-Christophe Faurel, the low-profile French trainer who has worked with Gauff on and off since she was 14.

Faurel most recently rejoined Gauff's entourage last spring to work alongside Gilbert. Gilbert and Gauff barely knew each other when she hired him in the summer of 2023. Weeks later she became US Open champion.

Osaka, on the other hand, moved on from Wim Fissette, the quiet, intellectual Belgian who helped her win two Grand Slam titles in 2020 and 2021. Fissette would be fine if he never appeared on television. Osaka's new coach is Patrick Mouratoglou, Serena Williams' former coach. He has a gift for motivation and self-promotion and has a brand empire that includes an academy in the south of France as well as the free-wheeling Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS) tennis exhibition events and coaching camps at luxury resorts.

Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka have made coaching changes, but from different tennis perspectives. (Yanshan Zhang/Getty Images)

He was almost too recognizable for Osaka. Mouratoglou's history with Williams and his presence in the game made her want to avoid him.

“His personality is so great,” Osaka said at a news conference in Beijing. So big that she was skeptical of his coaching abilities: anyone coaching the greatest player of the modern era would have enjoyed their share of Williams' success.

“Then I met him, talked to him and worked with him on the court,” she said.

“He’s absolutely a really good coach.”

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John Kerry, the longtime senator, U.S. secretary of state and American climate czar, once essentially reduced his philosophy of government, war and diplomacy to “getting things right as quickly as possible when you are wrong.”

Sports aphorists often cite the first law of holes: When you're in one, stop digging.

Both basically summarize the coaching focuses of Osaka and Gauff. Normally players make these changes after the end of the season and not two months before the end of the season. Gauff and Osaka are on the Asian swing, which is particularly important for Osaka, Japan's torchbearer at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago. Then come the WTA Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which Gauff could qualify for, and the Billie Jean King Cup in Malaga, Spain, which Osaka wants to take part in.

But by mid-September they already had all the data they needed to conclude that they were either going in the wrong direction (Gauff) or stalling (Osaka).

While Gauff's results were off target – with a fourth-round exit at Wimbledon to Emma Navarro before Donna Vekic beat her in the third round of the Paris Olympics – the bigger problem was technique. Gilbert's ability to cover up their weaknesses, one of his greatest strengths as a coach, had faded.

Good opponents had figured out how to counter the forehand looping he introduced to cover up their wobbliness on that side. They stepped in and caught the ball on the rise before it bounced high enough to trap them at the back of the pitch.

Against Navarro at Wimbledon, she begged Gilbert to tell her something and realized in that moment that she didn't have the tools she needed to escape Navarro.

Then there is her serve. At the US Open, her loss to Navarro in the fourth round included 19 double faults.

“I don’t want to lose games like this anymore,” she told reporters afterwards.

Gilbert, who has forgotten tennis more than most people know, would never describe himself as a serving specialist or even the kind of coach someone as technically challenged as Gauff would need. Even during Gilbert's tenure, Gauff had worked with Roddick on some minor serve adjustments.

In an interview last week, Gilbert wouldn't elaborate on his work with Gauff, but said it was a positive experience overall.

He believes the ultimate parameters of tennis have not changed. Players must figure out their strengths and then figure out what their opponent is good at. They then plan to assert their own strengths in the game while simultaneously nullifying those of their opponent. But At 63, after more than four decades in professional sports, Gilbert knows the drill. Once a player wins one of the Grand Slams, expectations rise, even if the competition remains tough. Everyone wants to win and there are only four majors every year.

Women's soccer is a little more unpredictable, Gilbert said, but still “there aren't a lot of options.”

“Every coaching experience is a unique experience and you progress,” he added. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

Gauff, only 20 years old, hopes for success, but is thinking long-term. She views the fall tournaments in Asia as an extended preparation for the season, prioritizing improvement over wins and a top-eight season finish that would qualify her for the season-ending Tour Finals.

Coco Gauff's forehand has long been a weak point against top-class opponents. (Yanshan Zhang/Getty Images)

Her team prefers their coaches talk little about them; She finds that the subtle changes Daly has made are already starting to pay off.

Daly, 45, played at Notre Dame and briefly coached Denis Shapovalov. He is the founder of a company that sells a device called GripMD that wraps around the handle of a racket and helps players use a traditional continental grip.

Gauff hits her forehand with a heavy western grip, practically holding the racket under the handle. Don't expect her to switch to a continental grip on her forehand any time soon – it's just not enough. Her immediate focus is on her serve, but he It may take some time for the dividends to appear in the statistics sheets. She had six double faults and 27 unforced errors in the two sets she and Osaka split on Tuesday before Osaka withdrew with a back injury.

If Gauff thinks long-term, Osaka wants results now. That wasn't always the case.

She endured tough draws throughout the season, most notably when she narrowly knocked out Iga Swiatek at the French Open. At the time, she was introspective and coined a little aphorism of her own: The results didn't happen, she told reporters. Fissette and Osaka were focused on their long-term comeback – for this season and the next five years. Waiting for the summer and fall, when tennis moves to the hard courts on which Osaka built her reputation, was the mantra.

This waiting caused Osaka's confidence to increasingly dwindle. After defeating her in New York, Karolina Muchova told reporters that a part of her dies if she loses. That Osaka was not the ironic, magnanimous Osaka of Paris. The French Open had been a lifetime ago in her world and she had thought she would have more success on her favorite surface. Muchova, who advanced to the US Open semifinals and was probably one volley away from the final, is largely doing what Osaka wants to do.

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Osaka and the rest of the locker room know she needs to come back better, improve her second serve and regain the confidence that, in her best moments, made her an absolute banker in crisis. That was her superpower more than anything, and it has been missing for much of this year.

That's why she moved to Mouratoglou two months before the end of the 2024 season. She is ranked No. 73 in the world and is desperate to break into the top 32 so she can be seeded at the Australian Open in January.

Fissette, her former coach, is known as a master strategist and tennis technician. In his world, trust comes from results. He shares with Mouratoglou a belief in playing aggressively and increasing that intensity when it brings results, but he is not the definition of a hype man. Mouratoglou could inspire a postman to deliver the mail.

The China Open is Naomi Osaka and Patrick Mouratoglou's first official tournament together. (Robert Prange/Getty Images)

Osaka had considered hiring Mouratoglou before reuniting with Fissette as she planned her comeback from maternity leave. She chose the Belgians because of their success story. When it didn't come back, She and Mouratoglou worked together after the US Open in California and then decided to compete on the women's tour together.

“I don’t want to have any regrets,” Osaka added in Beijing last week.

“I really need to learn as much as I can at this stage of my career. Patrick seemed like the guy with the information.”

They got off to a good start with three straight wins, including Osaka's first comeback from a deficit in over two years against Yulia Putintseva. But eEven the best coach cannot have much success with an injured player.

After shaking Gauff's hand in one sentence before the American carried her bag off the field, Osaka said her back had become so stiff in training that it was snapping. She was able to start, but her condition worsened as the game progressed.

“But it’s definitely worth it lol,” she wrote in Threads.

Sounds like something Mouratoglou would say.

(Top photo: Yanshan Zhang / Getty Images)