Amanda Anisimova spent eight months away from tennis to work on her mind.

“I think all the hard work I did on the inside was what really paid off for me,” she said last month in Riyadh.

When Anisimova returned in 2024, she needed to bring her body up to speed.

“We worked a lot on the fitness side,” said coach Hendrik Vleeshouwers, who joined her team ahead of the grass-court season. “To get her more capable of not being afraid to play the rallies, play long matches, to trust her body.

“And if she trusts her body, she can trust her strokes a bit more.”

And that faith — in mind and body — came together in an unprecedented way in 2025. Anisimova, who finished the 2024 season at No. 36 in the PIF WTA Rankings, reached two Grand Slam finals and finished at No. 4. No one crashed the Top 10 from further out; Anisimova climbed 32 spots, Ekaterina Alexandrova moved up 18 and Australian Open champion Madison Keys was plus-14.

As a result, the 24-year-old American has been named the WTA’s 2025 Most Improved Player of the Year.

The great leap in that journey came in a span of less than two months. After the thrill of a 6-4, 4-6, 6-4 victory over World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the Wimbledon semifinals, Anisimova suffered the devastation of a 6-0, 6-0 loss to Iga Swiatek in the final.

Her postmatch speech was remarkably graceful and gracious.

“I think the way she handled that was amazing — we all said that, too, afterward,” Vleeshouwers said. “I mean, only true champions can do it like that. She stole our hearts even more.”

After middling results in Montreal and Cincinnati, Anisimova rallied to reach the US Open quarterfinals. Before her rematch with Swiatek, without prompting from anyone, she watched highlights of the Wimbledon match back in her hotel.

Anisimova responded by dropping a 6-4, 6-3 defeat on Swiatek. She fought through two tiebreaks and three sets to advance past Naomi Osaka for her second straight major final, where she lost to Sabalenka.

Champions Reel: How Amanda Anisimova won Doha 2025

That run helped guarantee Anisimova’s qualification for the WTA Finals. Proving that the US Open victory was no fluke, she beat Swiatek for the second straight, 6-7 (3), 6-4, 6-2, to advance to the semifinals in Riyadh.

Before the tournament, Anisimova admitted the level of her this season’s success surprised her. But afterward …

“No,” she explained, “I don’t think I was surprised or shocked at any point in the match. I feel like I belong at this point, and I’ve played a lot of tough matches this year. So yeah, I know my capabilities.”

A brief accounting:

This year, Anisimova defeated all four reigning Grand Slam champions, something that hadn’t been done in seven years, won 10 matches against Top 10 players, more than she had previously in her entire career, and 13 straight three-set matches, all of them at Grand Slams or WTA 1000s or 500s.

Vleeshouwers saw flashes of this elite form when he came on in mid-2024, but their first result together was a loss — in the first round of qualifying on the grass at the Libema Open.

“I saw a lot of raw potential,” he said. “A lot of work to do, to get that raw potential into a playable form, like a fluid machine.”

And that’s just what she was in 2025 — winning WTA 1000 titles in Doha and Beijing, producing a record of 47-18 and winning more than $7 million in prize money.

Anisimova won’t turn 25 until next August. It’s worth noting that Sabalenka didn’t win her first Grand Slam singles title until she was 24 — and now she’s won four of the past 11 majors she’s played and reached 10 semifinals.

Vleeshouwers, for one, is looking forward to 2026.

“With the experience, I feel she’s going to be more emotionally stable,” he said. “Imagine she gets to the same areas somehow, and then we can easily look back at this year and use the data to do better.”