‘It’s like breaking up’: how tennis stars tread tricky tightrope with coaches

At the beginning of a bright new season in January, during a post-match press conference in Melbourne, Simona Halep was charged with assessing all the essential coaching decisions she made over the years on the way to becoming a champion. “I was lucky because I found the right people almost all the time,” she said, shrugging. “It was not that difficult, let’s say. I just went with my feeling, with what I felt, so what I felt, I did. I think I took the best decisions for my career.”

Halep discussed the subject of coaching with more confidence than any other player interviewed, yet within weeks her team had splintered. In February, five months after a surprise split from her longtime coach Darren Cahill, Halep announced the dissolution of her partnership with the Romanians Daniel Dobre and Adrian Marcu. She said she would play on without a coach for her personal growth and to “see how much I can do on my own”.

Not so much, it turns out. In Indian Wells last week, Halep had already executed a sharp U-turn, hiring new faces for her team. After only two tournaments, she said she realised just how hard it is to train, travel and play matches without a coach. Even an extremely successful 30-year-old player with 16 years’ experience under her belt is still figuring things out each day.

In most prominent sports, primarily team sports, the coaches have significant power and they control much of an athlete’s career. Many other individual athletes, meanwhile, are dictated by national federations. Then there is tennis, where the athlete is simultaneously the employer and the business itself, hiring people around them then going on to the court to perform alone. “When I spoke with athletes from other sports, they’re shocked,” says