MELBOURNE, Australia – At Melbourne Park for the Australian Open, there is a young woman who looks a lot like Coco Gauff. She has the same fiery, competitive eyes, the same tendency to burst into a giggle mid-sentence, and the same number of titles.

However, her tennis is different. This Gauff has become the sporty version of an iPhone, with a new model coming out almost every year.

The prototype was entirely focused on athleticism and attack. Then the forehand got shaky and in the summer of 2023 Gauff 2.0 came out, the winning version led by Brad Gilbert.

Using high, heavy topspin on the forehand to protect its key weakness and chasing balls into every corner of the court to defend it day and night: This variation won the 2023 US Open, her only Grand Slam title.

Then the winning-ugly model stopped winning and the losses were ugly. Gauff fell behind then world No. 1 Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina, left Wimbledon and lost her US Open title to Emma Navarro, who hit one more ball than even Gauff could manage.

Out went Gilbert, and in came the development of Gauff 3.0, which focused on correcting the serve and forehand.

She and her team expected it to be a three or four month project. Gauff, who reached the US Open girls final at 13 and won her first match on Center Court against Venus Williams at 15, has a habit of arriving earlier than planned. She began to see results after her last reboot in three or four weeks, and has been trending steadily upward for the most part since then.

Gauff has a record of 18-2 since her exit from the US Open. She has defeated her nemesis Swiatek twice and Sabalenka once. She won the WTA 1000 tournament in Beijing and then also the WTA Tour Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, earning her $5.5 million (£4.5 million), her highest earnings of all time in women’s tennis. She then led the United States to the United Cup title in Australia, which included a victory over Swiatek.

So far, Gauff 3.0, who started her Australian Open against compatriot Sofia Kenin on Monday afternoon, has been the version of Gauff that many of the competitors always feared would one day come.

Her 6-3, 6-3 win over the 2020 Australian Open champion was a reminder that this is a work in progress and that progress in tennis is not always linear.

Gauff double-faulted nine times and had a little trouble with her groundstrokes as Kenin held the ball outside her strike zone. She had more unforced errors than winners. It was the kind of match that would send her to a practice court to hit for another 45 minutes, but early rounds are often nervy and easy outs are rare in women’s tennis.

Gauff stayed out of danger on Monday, but she knows that won’t always be the case – especially if she makes it to the later rounds – along the way, the problems with the wobbly serve and the unstable forehand, the two most important ones strokes to overcome in tennis.

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To achieve this, Gauff turned to two trainers, one new and one who has accompanied her in all her developments. Jean-Christophe Faurel has worked with her on and off since her early teens, but it is Matt Daly, a former D1 player in the NCAAs at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, who has changed her new game.

Daly came on board weeks after Gauff committed 19 double faults in her three-set loss to Navarro at the US Open. In her press conference she said that she never wanted to lose a game like that again. Whether she won or lost, she no longer wanted to play ugly. Daly arrived to lead some of the heavy reconstruction work that Gauff and her father, Corey, her first coach and still a major presence, had deemed essential.

His diagnosis was that Gauff’s grip caused her to hit the face of her racket too quickly during her serving motion. She didn’t have enough time to make real contact with the ball.

Generally, most players use a continental grip when serving, as if shaking hands. Some players turn their hand a little further – for Gauff, a right-handed player, a little further to the left – and thus approach an eastern backhand grip.

This makes it easier to add topspin to the serve and is therefore often used on second serves to help them on serve and out of the service box. In Gauff’s case, she hit her second serves into the bottom net too often. Before each serve, Daly had her draw a mark on her grip that told her exactly where to position her hand and rotate it back closer to the continent. The marking remains.

Turning your wrist millimeters might sound like a small change. That’s not it. As Sabalenka discovered in 2022, tearing down a serving motion built up over a lifetime of repetitions is one of the most vulnerable things a tennis player can do.

At first it looked as if Gauff’s forehand also needed a grip adjustment. Like Swiatek, she basically grips her racket under the handle – a heavy western grip. Changing a forehand grip means changing the timing, swing arc, and everything else about the shot. Experts told Corey Gauff that it could be a nine-month project.

Daly and Faurel didn’t think this was necessary. The problem wasn’t her grip. It was her tendency to rely on her legs to grind, defend and hit, while shifting her weight backwards, which caused her to rise too much onto the ball rather than through it, causing her to knock it all over the place . If she did less of that and played more aggressively, emphasizing offense and offense more, she wouldn’t be making as many forehands from difficult positions.

Instead of using her legs for defense, Gauff now uses them to get her into the early position to receive the ball more often with an aggressive, open-stance forehand.

In her pre-tournament press conference in Melbourne on Friday, Gauff said it wasn’t all pleasant at first. She had to convince herself that she could handle the discomfort and awkwardness of holding and attacking the bat differently. At some point the rewards would pay off.

“Even though it’s uncomfortable, I’m focusing on that long-term path and making sure I make the adjustments that I need to hopefully have a good career long-term,” she said.

From her point of view, she didn’t have much choice. The best players play more aggressively every year. Defending in court became a more difficult and less viable option.

“I know there will be some difficult moments in this tournament,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll get through.”

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Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion, could cause some problems for Gauff. She defeated Gauff in the first round of Wimbledon in 2023. This defeat prompted her team to hire Gilbert to start the final Coco reboot.

In Melbourne, Gauff said the technical change in her game also affected her mentality. As her title defense in New York became difficult to endure throughout the tournament, she began to remember that she had already won one and that she would have many more chances to win another.

“As athletes, we get into trouble and losing feels like the end of the world, and winning feels like something we should do rather than something we should be grateful for.” No one gives us anything but ourselves such a feeling. I think I just realized it’s never that important.”

Gauff played her final game of the 2024 season on November 9. She skipped the Billie Jean King Cup, traveled home to Florida and put her rackets away for the next two weeks. She has cut back a lot on her daily fitness routine. She had no obligations to her sponsors, no fashion photo shoots. She traveled to California with her friends for a music festival. She only played a competitive game again shortly before the New Year. It was the longest offseason she can remember.

During the fall, in the midst of Reconstruction, when the results didn’t matter to her, she tried not to let her mind wander to that place. It didn’t always work out, but now she feels like she’s playing the best tennis of her life. Now it’s a test of whether composure can last for a player who has fallen victim to frustration in the past.

“Stay in the moment and enjoy it as much as you can,” she said.

“I did that in the last few tournaments. The results were therefore obviously good. But I’m just trying to learn to do that, even if the results aren’t that good.”

(Photo above: Getty Images; Design: Meech Robinson)