It is considered by most players and fans the Mecca of tennis, a magical place of carefully curated perfection where every strawberry is the correct shade of red and every blade of grass comes with its own horticulturist. Wimbledon is one of the great sporting institutions and to be inside its walls is to feel like you have access to an exclusive, special place.
Each summer we get a window into what life is like as a player, the stresses and strains and joy and history that all come with a place at the Championships. But what is it like to be a coach? How is it to be in the background, a member of the entourage trying to make the dream come true?
The Independent spoke to three coaches on their experience at the All England Club:
Oivind Sovland
Coaching team of Casper Ruud, world No 15
“It’s a big difference [to regular ATP tournaments]. Most coaches stay with their players at the same hotel, and they can choose everything from a five-star hotel, and other ones are going within an Airbnb apartment. If you have a day where you’re playing, you come up [to Wimbledon] early, do the warm-up sessions after breakfast, and you start having your same kind of rituals every day.
“On a playing day, you get a little bit of hit time – half an hour on a side court – and then you’re waiting. Other than the first match every day when you know it’s 11 o’clock, then you don’t know if it’s two hours, if it’s at 1 o’clock or 3 o’clock, so it’s very hard to prepare. But the players are used to this, so they go through the same kind of routines every time. Once it’s the last set [of the preceding match], now they’re getting ready and warm-up mentally, physically. The coaches stay very close to the player, and they go through the strategy and the plan A and B, and they say, ‘When this is happening, this is what you do; if this is happening, that’s what you do’. And after the match, it’s a debrief saying, ‘Well, you won, now you’re going to prepare for the next one’. It’s 12 hours, it’s a full day, and you come up in the evening and it’s dinner with the team.
“When you have a day off, it’s quite normal to spend the whole day out on the practice field. You go there for an hour and a half, but it’s a little bit shorter, those days, and you try to get back into town and to the hotel, so you spend time with the team. I think that’s when the players are different: some want to talk about the match tomorrow, others just want to relax and not talk about tennis.
“For the coaches, it’s quite stressful because there’s also media, there are other things that they need to do with sponsors, everyone is super busy. If they have a team or an analyst then they have meetings with them and see, what do we do for the next match? So it’s a very, very busy day when you’re in the tournament. Everything is different at the big grand slams because of the crowds and all the regulations, what you have to do for press and press conferences. It’s a higher pace, and Wimbledon is very crowded. But it’s a very nice player lounge, and the food is nice, so it’s very relaxed in one way. But the schedule is very busy.”
Craig O’Shannessy
Former strategist for Novak Djokovic, working with several players at Wimbledon this year
“When I was a kid [in Australia], I was that kid who would come home from school and go to bed at 8 o’clock so I could wake up at midnight and watch Wimbledon till 5am. There’s every other tennis tournament and nothing comes close to Wimbledon. It is mythical, it is a fantasy world, it is Disneyland on steroids.
“I helped Novak at all four slams, but my happiest, greatest day in tennis was being in the coaches box at Wimbledon, assisting Dustin Brown to beat Rafa [Nadal] in 2015. It was such an exciting match, and the roar of the crowd, and to beat Rafa on Centre Court at Wimbledon is a fairytale.
“I’m doing coaching duties but I also have a media badge and I’m the first journalist on site at around 7.10 every morning, and I go straight out to Centre Court. I spend a few minutes out there, then I go and write an article, and then I come back and catch up with Neil Stubley, the head groundsman, a very good friend of mine. I do a lot of my coaching work early in the morning so that it frees me up in the afternoon to watch matches and to experience Wimbledon.
“You get treated so well in so many areas. They do such a great job of putting the players first, and yes, there’s a lot of rules. That’s the English, if you can put a rule on something, they’ll do it! There’s a little bit of, ‘you can go here but you can’t go there’, but it all comes with the privilege and the honour of being at Wimbledon and being a coach here, so I have no problems with how they run the tournament or how they treat people. I think it’s first class.
“There is no other sporting event like it. For me to work there, to coach there, to have worked with various players on big matches, it’s a dream.”
Dani Vallverdu
Andy Murray’s former coach, now with world No 21 Grigor Dimitrov
“My experience here at Wimbledon is a great one as a coach. For me, it’s the most special tournament in the world. Over the years, especially in the last 15 years, the tours and all the slams have really focused on not only the experience of the player, but the experience of the whole team that’s with the player 40 weeks a year, traveling the world, and that has made the overall coaching and performance-team experience on tour much better than what it used to be. All the services that the player gets are the same ones that the coach gets, and then you get great transportation, you get great food, you’re allowed to access all the facilities. You even get laundry like the player does!
“You get to bring family and friends if you request it. Obviously you don’t have as much access as a player does, understandably so, because there’s a limited amount of space. Would it be nice for the coaches and their support teams to be able to bring more friends to family at times? Yes, but is it fair to the whole tennis ecosystem at the tournament? I don’t believe so.
“But yeah, in terms of how it feels, this is the best feeling of the year for me, because it’s my favourite tournament.”
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