© Getty Images Sport – Hannah Peters
Coco Gauff said as a little girl she instantly fell in love with tennis and revealed that watching Serena and Venus Williams on TV made her motivated to one day be doing those same things. Gauff, 19, was six when she picked up a racket for the first time.
At the time, the Williams sisters were strong forces in the game and were doing major things, especially Serena. Today, Gauff is the highest-ranked American female tennis player and she recently became the first American teenager since Serena Williams in 1999 to win the US Open.
For Gauff, it was her first Grand Slam title.
Gauff on the Williams sisters inspiring her to dream big
“I wouldn’t say it was like something that I asked to do, he just like brought it and like, then I just gravitated towards it.
I would hit on the wall and inside the house a lot. We had a basement and then I would hit on the garage door and I just loved playing and just liked it a lot. And then seeing Serena and Venus being so electric on TV made me want to do something like that, too.
And then it just became a part of me pretty much after, I would say, the age of eight is when I really fell in love with it. I started at six. But I think eight is when I knew I wanted to take it seriously. I was still doing other sports, but I knew tennis was the one I wanted to continue with,” Gauff said in a video for the Western & Southern Open.
One thing that is very symbolic about Gauff’s US Open win is that it came exactly a year after Serena’s retirement at Flushing Meadows. For many years, Gauff was tipped as someone who would follow in the footsteps of Serena and start bringing Grand Slam titles to American women’s tennis. Gauff is just 19 years old and many believe more Slam wins are in the store for the American.
