Industry leader Simona Halep will start the upcoming season without a new coach. After Darren Cahill’s departure, she wants to take her time looking for a coach.
The trainer carousel has been spinning especially fast on the women’s tour during the last weeks. Most surprising was the separation of Wimbledon winner Angelique Kerber and Wim Fissette after only one year of working together. The Kielerin explained only last Wednesday in Cologne her motives, why she engaged Rainer Schüttler as successor of the Belgian.
Simona Halep also has to hire a coach after Darren Cahill announced at the beginning of November that he would be looking after his family intensively in 2019. But does she really have to? Halep, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be under any time pressure to get someone to her side five weeks before the start of the new season.
“I’ve thought about it and won’t have a coach in the near future,” said the world’s top ranking Romanian media, announcing, “I want to do a few tournaments on my own and see how it goes,” he said.
Halep will start 2019 as a lone fighter and it will be interesting to see whether the 27-year-old will also compete in the first Grand Slam event of the year, the Australian Open (14 to 27 January), without a coach. On my own, so to speak. Last season in Melbourne she lost a dramatic final in three sets against Caroline Wozniacki and had to spend the night in a clinic because of dehydration.
A good four months later Halep fulfilled her dream at the French Open in Paris and won her first major trophy. I don’t want it to be the only one. According to Romanian reports, a triumph at Wimbledon now has the highest priority for Halep.
“I want a new Grand Slam trophy, that’s the goal every year,” she said – and stressed that success on Church Road would be a particularly “sweeter” one. In 2014, “Simo”, who is a folk hero in her home country, had reached the semi-finals in Mecca’s lawn and lost to Eugenie Bouchard.
Halep had to cancel her participation in the WTA finals in Singapore in October due to a herniated disc. Nevertheless, the right-hander from Constanta finished the year as number one in the world for the second time in a row.