Serena Williams 'Of Today' Isn't The Same Player She Was, Says Coach

After almost two decades, renowned tennis coach Patrick Mouratoglou has witnessed a lot of changes in Serena Williams.

The Mouratoglou-Williams tandem will go down in tennis history as one of the greatest team-up of all time.

For almost 20 years, Mouratoglou has been the man behind Williams’ success, having coached the former WTA No. 1 player to 10 grand slam titles.

But like any other hands-on coach, Mouratoglou had also been part of his star athlete’s life outside the court.

Mouratoglou has been on Williams’ side since 2012 as well as during and after she became a mother.

Assessing the 23-time grand slam titlist through the years, the Frenchman concluded that Williams always managed to “adapt” to all the changes in her career which made her an even better athlete at present.

“I have to adapt, all the time. All the time,” Mouratoglou told iNews about coaching Williams. “As a coach, you have to always be aware of your player, his or her evolution. The sentence that I always use is ‘we don’t have to listen to what they say, we have to hear what they think’.”

“And for that, we have to take all the information we can get from them, and understand why they are how they think, how they process,” he continued. “There are stages in people’s lives and I don’t think that the Serena of today is the same. She has developed a lot since 2012 and I think that I also have to adapt to that all the time.”

Apart from Williams, Mouratoglou has honed an array of world-class tennis players over the last 25 years, including Coco Gauff and Stefanos Tsitsipas.

According to the 50-year-old, every pupil is “different” and the key to help them reach their peak and to not force them to follow a specific “method.”

“I believe that all players have a different culture of tennis, different qualities, different needs, different relationship with sports, different environment, and that we have to take everything into consideration,” the coach pointed out.

“Instead of asking the players to fit into a method, the idea is to create a method that is unique for each player,” he further explained. “And I was sure that we would get so much better results with that. And actually, I think we showed that we were able to make a much better result.”

“The way I speak to the players is different for each player and even I think that my personality is different. If I work with Serena [Williams], if I work with Coco [Gauff], if I work with Stefanos [ Tsitsipas], or if I work before with [Marcos] Baghdatis or [Grigor] Dimitrov because they don’t need the same person. We have only one goal: find a way to maximize the potential of each player.”