Coco Vandeweghe plays the best year of her career. The number ten in the world was almost solely responsible for winning the Fed Cup title.
Sloane Stephens, of course, joined in the celebrations, sharing the official winning image of the US team in the social networks. And why not: A Fed Cup title like this adorns every tennis biography, even though Stephen’s victory in the US Open at the beginning of September was an unsurpassable highlight.
The winner of the Days of Minsk, what: the whole Fed Cup year, however, was Coco Vandeweghe. She had managed to keep her nerves in check, both individual games against Aryna Sabalenka and Aliaksandra Sasnovich, and then she won the doubles at Shelby Rogers’ side against the Weissrussinnen.
Stephens, on the other hand, was unable to play Sabalenka 5-2 in the third set.
So, all is well for Coco Vandeweghe, who will finish 2017 as one of the top ten players in the world for the first time? After all, the 25-year-old has reached two semi-finals at Grand Slam tournaments in the past season, most recently in the final of the WTA Elite Trophy in Zhuhai, and Vandeweghe made it to the final at Stanford in the summer. But there, however, Madison Keys was just as sensitive to the loss of Madison Keys as in the US Open’s preliminary round. In Zhuhai Julia Görges left the square with the winning cheque.
So the Fed Cup triumph of the native New Yorker is missing, as well as the big title. Vandeweghe’s game plan has its greatest effect on fast surfaces, at least the lawn in Wimbledon is still the fastest. But there, Vandeweghe was probably the biggest disappointment of the year, the quarter-final defeat against Magdalena Rybarikova. A lawn expert, but not a player against whom a lady with Coco Vandeweghe’s ambitions should lose on her way to a Grand Slam title. Especially not when Pat Cash, a man sitting in the trainer’s box, is sitting in the coach’s box, who combines the best sporting memories with the facility on Church Road.
In New York, Vandeweghe had beaten the then world number one Karolina Pliskova in the quarter-finals, and had visibly impressed the Czech with her self-confident appearance in the well-filled Arthur Ashe Stadium. Against Keys, there was much less to be seen.
Vandeweghe doesn’t always give the impression that she would like to be happy with herself on the tennis court, her playing, the audience, and the weather. The speech to the ball children is usually challenging, the basic confidence shown in the own abilities of Vandeweghe, who come from a family of top athletes, is remarkable. How this is received by the competitors could be well known. That Julia Görges had intended to give her a big hug after the final in Zhuhai may also be due to the fact that the new German number one is just a very nice person.
At the end of a Fed Cup year, Coco Vandeweghe will still have the title with the US American team. She took all six individual games. Incidentally, the only set Vandeweghe lost in 2017 in the most important women’s tennis competition was won by a German player: Andrea Petkovic succeeded in this feat in Hawaii.