NEW YORK – Relief is the best way to explain how Coco Gauff is feeling, considering in her last match at the US Open, a 7-6 (7-5), 6-2 second-round victory over unseeded Donna Vekic, she was crying on the bench, unable to figure out why her serve was once again betraying her and searching for answers on the fly.
Gauff set those concerns aside Saturday and is into the fourth round for the fourth straight year with an efficient and dominant 6-3, 6-1 win in the third round over No. 28 seed Magdalena Frech of Poland, who failed in her attempt to reach the final 32 of a Grand Slam tournament for only the second time.
The No. 3 seed and 2023 US Open champion had only four double faults in the match after combining for 18 in the first two rounds. Her serve looked cleaner from the beginning, winning 71% of her first serves, and she didn’t need to be overpowering with her forehand, as she only had 12 winners. Much has been made of her hiring biomechanics expert Gavin MacMillan just a week before this tournament to help address her issues with her serve.
‘It’s been an emotional week,’ Gauff said after the match, ‘but I think I needed those tough moments to move forward. I was putting so much pressure on myself, but today I showed I was really having fun out there. I think for me, I guess I’m more proud of, like, the mental effort of things and trying to remember the things that we worked on in practice. Today I definitely think was a step in the right direction. I would love to continue to build and improve on that.’
The 21-year-old Gauff now moves on to face No. 23 seed Naomi Osaka, and she now has 74 wins in Grand Slam matches before the age of 22. Since 2000, only Maria Sharapova (85) has more.
The last time the two played at the US Open was in 2019, when Osaka won their third-round match 6-3, 6-0, in which a then 15-year-old Gauff was making her Arthur Ashe Stadium debut and was emotional after the match.
‘Naomi and I, we aren’t super close or anything, but we’re definitely friendly with each other. I support her from afar in all the things that she’s done on and off the court,’ Gauff said, adding she would hope to play Osaka on Ashe at night again. ‘It would be a cool kind of deja vu type of situation, but hopefully it will be a different result.’
After Frech won the first game of the second set, Gauff exerted her dominance, forcing Frech into 29 unforced errors for the match, with Frech sometimes shaking her head in frustration or staring at the baseline after another ball went out of play.
Gauff started the match dominating, going up 3-0, before Frech rallied after Gauff double-faulted into the net to break serve. It was tied at three games each before Gauff went on another rally to close out the set, winning three straight games.
She had little trouble in the second set after losing the first game, easing her way through her now confident serve, finishing the set in 20 minutes.