Mumbai: As Marta Kostyuk and Katie Volynets contested the second round of Roland Garros on Wednesday, their teams shared a peculiar commonality: female coaches.
Kim Clijsters is temporarily working with Volynets at this clay-court Grand Slam, while Sandra Zaniewska has been with Kostyuk since 2023. Zaniewska was also there earlier this month in Madrid, where Conchita Martinez sat in the opposite player box for the final between Kostyuk and Mirra Andreeva.
These are rare sightings in tennis, a sport not brimming with women coaches. Even for female pros, let alone men.
Just three singles players in the top 50 of the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) rankings currently have a woman as their primary coach: Andreeva, Kostyuk and Anna Kalinskaya.
Expand the search to the top 100 and the number remains only a handful. Switch to the men’s ATP tour and finding a female coach is even rarer, despite former world No.1 Andy Murray moving the needle by bringing on Amelie Mauresmo during his playing days.
Why then, in a sport where players across gender share the most prestigious of courts on the biggest of Slam stages, is the men-women ratio in coaches so skewed?
First off, though the change is small, there has been some progress from decades ago.
“When I was playing, there were really like one or two female coaches out there,” Ann Grossman-Wunderlich, the American former world No.29 who competed on the WTA tour through the 1980s and 1990s, told HT. “We were just not brought up with female coaches working with us.”
Ann, 55, began coaching the year she decided to retire as a pro, and is currently coaching a few kids in Florida “one my own”. It’s more difficult for women to break into the male dominated “boys’ club” of elite tennis coaching, said Ann, in which player agents are often “really involved”, according to her.
There are several other multi-layered factors, including cultural and societal ones.
For most female pros, priorities often shift once they are done playing on the tour. For women with families and kids, the prospect of travelling year-round again as a coach might not be as appealing.
“I don’t know if it’s that much because of knowledge or anything,” Polina Radeva, lead coach at the Rafa Nadal Academy who is working with India’s Maaya Rajeshwaran Revathi, said about the fewer female coaches.
“But it’s a different lifestyle for a tennis coach. So I do think that women in that age prioritize different things,” she added in an interaction organised by SAI.
“Once we’re done playing, we’re like, okay, we want a bit of a normal life,” said Ann.
Some former female stars have, thus, only taken up temporary coaching gigs, like Clijsters and Agnieszka Radwanska who was briefly part of Magda Linette’s team.
A lot of young male coaches start out as hitting partners. For lower-ranked players who can’t afford more than one travelling team member, coaches who can double up as hitting partners during tournaments is a tempting bonus.
“I think players might view female coaches that can’t hit with them, (and be) like, okay, is she really able to help me?” Zaniewska told ESPN.
For Ann, though, that’s “a bit of an excuse”. Ann is also president of the Women’s Tennis Coaching Association (WTCA), which was founded to give coaches (female or male) more opportunities and a development pathway for women coaches.
The non-profit body has hit a bit of a roadblock due to a lack of membership after the pandemic. Even then, said Ann, they had more male members than female. “That says something,” she added.
And shows there aren’t enough female coaches even at the grassroots level. Certainly so in India.
“Growing up, most kids start with a male coach,” said Ann. “It’s what the WTA is trying to do – give more opportunities to female coaches to keep working and learning.”
The WTA has a Coach Inclusion Program to fast-track female coaches up the ladder. As per their numbers, from just 6% registered female coaches in 2017, it was expected to be 19% in 2025.
There are more examples of younger players starting to have female coaches by their side. Like Canada’s Victoria Mboko, whose stunning rise to the top 10 was shaped by former French world No.3 Nathalie Tauziat, and Maaya.
“And you see now Andreeva and Kostyuk being coached by a woman. You see that a lot more on tour,” said Radeva. “I do think that the more exposure those good players get, the more common it will be.”
And the more the likes of Andreeva (ranked 8th) and Kostyuk (15th) continue to rise, the more the stocks of female coaches can grow.
“The more success that the female coaches have out there, the more acceptable it’s going to be to have a female coach,” said Ann.
