The biggest before-and-after moment in Aryna Sabalenka’s life came five years ago, when her father, Sergey, a former ice hockey player, died suddenly of meningitis at 43. She was 21 at the time.
There’s another moment, far less weighty, that changed the trajectory of Sabalenka’s tennis life.
It happened outside a stadium in the Canadian city of Toronto in August 2022, after a three-set loss to Coco Gauff in the round of 16 at the National Bank Open.
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Sabalenka served 18 double faults that day. The previous day, she had served 16 of them, in a match she won. The previous week, she had served 20 double faults in a quarter-final loss to Daria Kasatkina in San Jose, California, and 23 double faults in the match before that.
Her matches had become tennis car accidents. Her serve was gone.
Sitting on the ground in Canada and crying, Sabalenka had reached breaking point. She had tried everything, she told her two main coaches, Jason Stacy and Anton Dubrov: countless hours with sports psychologists, visualization, endless practice. Nothing had worked.
That’s when Stacy, a high-performance expert with a background in mixed martial arts, laid into her.
No, he said, you’re wrong. There was one thing she hadn’t done. It was the thing that terrified her, even more than double-faulting more than 20 times live on international television.
And then he challenged her, because if there was one thing he had learned about Sabalenka in their years working together, it’s that she never, ever, backs down from a challenge.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked her. “You know, you have to face this fear, period.”
Stacy was calling on her to do the scariest thing any athlete can face: scrapping a lifetime of learning and years of muscle memory to break it down and start again. He was asking her to raze her serve so she could rebuild it.
“I was like, ‘Otherwise, why are we doing this?’. We’re done for the season, maybe next year. Just f**k this. Why are you doing this? Why? It’s stupid. Let’s just stop. We’re all going to stop. We already talked about it. We’re done. It’s finished,” Stacy recalled during an interview in Indian Wells, California, in March this year.
Sabalenka didn’t hesitate.
OK, she told him, let’s do it.
The tennis serve is biomechanically complex, the only mandatory shot in the sport, and the most important. Double-faulting is disastrous when it happens, conceding a point for free in a contest where matches are often decided by just a few of them. But it’s also disastrous when serving is going well, or when winning comes easily. It gnaws into the psyche and infiltrates the muscle memory, which is bad enough, but then it does something else.
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It lies dormant. Serving is fine. Everything is fine. And then, suddenly, one serve goes long. Another goes in the net. ‘No big deal, one point, get it back.’ Another serve long and another in the net and then the player is broken and the game is over and they are sitting down at the chair wondering what on earth happened and how they can fix it and whether the match is already over and on and on and on.
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It can be fixed — but the problem with tennis is that it doesn’t allow you much time to fix things. The schedule is relentless; the off-season lasts a matter of weeks. Players have to try to make changes on the fly or not at all.
Fortunately for Sabalenka, in tears on the floor that day in Toronto, Stacy already had a plan and was already handing her his phone.
On the other end of the line was Gavin MacMillan, a Canadian former college tennis player who lives in South Africa and specializes in biomechanics. He was in California at the time. He had already seen videos of her serving.
MacMillan asked Sabalenka if she was all right.
No, she said, she was not.
He told her that was understandable. “But I’m going to tell you, 100 percent this is not mental,” MacMillan recalled recently from his home in Pretoria, where he has trained some of the world’s top rugby players.
“I said, ‘Your serve mechanics are wrong and you need to change them’.”
Sabalenka asked if MacMillan could help her do that. He told her he was sure he could, and two days later they were on a tennis court in Cincinnati, Ohio.
MacMillan believes it’s harder to achieve excellence in tennis than in any other sport. You have to master at least seven different biomechanical motions — the serve, forehand and backhand volleys and groundstrokes, overheads, and both forehand and backhand returns. It requires speed and endurance, and the ability to adapt to constantly changing balls, courts and conditions.
The Canadian can get very deep on the biomechanics of serving very quickly. His basic philosophy involves getting the arms, shoulders and spine in the right positions so the latter can get to a point of inflection and then snap up and through the ball. It’s a matter of geometry and physics, and Sabalenka’s math was all off.
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Her left hand was in the wrong position after she released the ball, which prevented her scapula (shoulder blade) from releasing and ended up pulling her down instead of helping her rise up. Also, she was pointing her racket at the back fence as she entered her motion, which prevented it from properly rotating up through the ball.
“The game was over before she even started,” MacMillan said.
He tried to keep the instructions simple. For three days, they did little else but serve. And there was good news — Sabalenka could make her body do what she wanted it to fairly quickly.
She hit four double faults in her next match and six in the one after that. Her third match produced 12, but she won anyway; then she lost in the semi-finals to a hot Caroline Garcia. It was still success. She had kept the double faults to single digits. She had made the semis. And more importantly, according to her team, she had stopped talking about the problem and actually tried to fix it.
“She kept asking, ‘What do I do?’,” Stacy said.
“But I’m like, ‘I don’t know right now. This isn’t about: this is the answer, here’s the magic pill’.
“I go, ‘There’s no answer right now. All this, all we’re doing right now, is trying to help figure out why the hell it is happening, helping you understand why it is and what it is, naming it almost, like putting it out there making it real, because right now it’s all in your head’.”
Now it was out of her head, the rest of Sabalenka’s tennis life could start.
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Too often in tennis, men, who dominate the coaching and training ranks, get credit for the success of women. That is not what Sabalenka’s story is about. Talk to Stacy, Dubrov and MacMillan even for a few minutes, and they will give Sabalenka all the credit for her success.
Dubrov is a 28-year-old former player who never got higher than world No 1,935. He is far younger than most top coaches, and was just 25 when Sabalenka installed him to lead her team. Stacy, 50, is a martial arts specialist who found his way into tennis after spending several years as a homeless teenager, then as a trainer for combat fighters and the Seattle Sounders before they were an MLS team. MacMillan is better known for training rugby, football and baseball players than the elite of tennis.
That’s not exactly the kind of tennis blue-blood often found at the top of the sport — and yet, it works, they say, because of three main qualities: their constant, open communication, Sabalenka’s intolerance of any talk that doesn’t feel honest and authentic, and their unceasing efforts to inject play into the work.
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They plan practices, design workouts, and provide technical expertise, but she is the one who absorbs and applies it. She goes into battle alone.
She did it after her father died. She did it when her serve made her the subject of ridicule and derision. She has done it for the past two years, as the leaders of Russia and Belarus turn athletes from their countries into pariahs following the invasion of Ukraine. (Sabalenka, who lives in Miami, has called the war in Ukraine “stupid”.)
She did it the past two months following the sudden death in March of her ex-boyfriend, Konstantin Koltsov, a former professional ice hockey player. Koltsov fell from a balcony at the St Regis Bal Harbour Resort in Miami. Police have ruled the death a suicide. Although Sabalenka and Koltsov were no longer together, she called the death an “unthinkable tragedy” as she tried to find a balance between grieving and moving on with the rest of her life and a new relationship.
Sabalenka is still quick to point out how much she relies on her team, an oddball bunch that also includes her hitting partner Andrei Vasilevski, a former Davis Cup player for Belarus. Her rituals of dancing on court with them, signing Stacy’s shaved head, and other japes have become part of her tennis identity as she has risen to be the indisputable second-best women’s player in the world. (Fulfilling this position behind Iga Swiatek is, as anyone who watches tennis knows, quite difficult.)
“I would call them my family,” Sabalenka said of her team last week in Rome. “They’ve been there for me no matter what. I had so many tough life situations, and they were there for me, supporting me and doing everything for me. I’m trying to pay them back the same way. I’m always there for them. Whatever they need, I’m happy to help them.”
It’s been that way for a while now. In a sport where coaches and players play musical chairs, Sabalenka has been with the core of her crew for the better part of six years — and they prefer to do dances on TikTok rather than playing that game anyway.
Dubrov first saw Sabalenka during a junior European Cup competition when she was about 16. Like anyone else seeing her for the first time, he could not believe how hard she hit the ball.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god’,” he said recently over coffee in Madrid. “It’s a winner or it’s an unforced error straight away, right? But the passion was unbelievable.”
Dubrov ended up on the other end of those shots before too long, as a hitting partner for the top junior women in Belarus. Then he joined Sabalenka as her full-time hitting partner. That is how he met Stacy, who was brought into the fold by Sabalenka’s former coach, Dimitry Tursunov. Stacy is a kind of father figure of the crew, which is a little odd, since his bald head and sunglasses-at-night look don’t exactly convey paternal vibes.
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Dubrov said he didn’t really know what to expect from Stacy.
“Jujitsu guy, right?” Dubrov said.
In reality, he is a high-energy force who sees every problem as a challenge or an opportunity. He likes to talk through every obstacle, but not to just discuss it. He demands that Sabalenka is honest and aware of what’s happened before anything is done. That’s what happened outside that stadium in Toronto, but those conversations can still run and run.
Sabalenka can be funny and bubbly off the court but has a temper to match her athletic gifts on it, and an obduracy that follows her out of the tramlines too. When the stress ramped up, she would get so hot she could barely breathe or function, let alone serve.
That is when it helps to have someone with a background in martial arts: a discipline in controlling your breathing and your emotions when you are facing someone beating the crap out of you.
Being honest and being aware has paid off.
Since the start of 2023, Sabalenka has won more Grand Slam titles than any other woman, including the world No 1 Swiatek. She was the only woman last year to make the semi-finals of all four Grand Slams. She is the only woman other than Swiatek to hold the No 1 ranking since March of 2022, when Ash Barty retired. All this from a woman who served up 428 double faults in 55 matches in 2022 — 151 more than any other woman on the WTA Tour.
Swiatek, who has won three of the past four French Opens and is a clay-court savant, is undoubtedly the heavy favorite heading into Roland Garros, which begins Sunday. But Sabalenka is not all that far behind, especially if the weather heats up, the air dries out and the ball starts flying off the red clay.
Women’s tennis is veering toward a triangular rivalry, with Elena Rybakina joining the top two. Gauff is banging on the door to make it a foursome.
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The heavyweight matchup of the moment, though, is Swiatek and Sabalenka.
They played in the recent finals in Madrid and Rome, the two biggest clay tournaments of the year other than the French Open. Swiatek was dominant in Rome, but Madrid seemed more like what is to come — matches decided by the narrowest of margins, a forehand that dives into the corner, a serve that nicks the outside of a line. Sabalenka was one point away from winning. Swiatek found a way.
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In these contests, Dubrov says the goal is to help Sabalenka understand that she doesn’t have to hit beautiful, frozen-rope winners on every point. She can play a simple game, with simple tactics, adjust to whatever level she has on any given day, build points and be just a little bit better than her opponent.
“Try to trust your strokes,” he says. “Trust that you can actually produce the point.”
The trick is learning to do that under stress. Dubrov imitates a drunken fan and screams insults at her during serving practice. His latest tactic is making her play for money during training. It’s intense, he says, not like a tournament, where if you win you get money and if you lose it costs you nothing but pride. In these games, if you lose, you pay, and Sabalenka hates both.
Sometimes, he makes her and Vasilevski play a set with a few thousand dollars on the line. Sometimes, she has to hit a certain number of consecutive serves or other shots through two cones, or she has to pay Dubrov $100. If she pulls it off, he has to pay her. He swears that those wager sets are the highest intensity levels he ever sees in a practice, so much so that it’s almost like the real thing.
This is where betting against Sabalenka can get truly dangerous, even if she considers you her family.
Dubrov is down roughly $5,000 in the past six months.
(Top photo: Robert Prange/Getty Images)
