INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Emma Raducanu is in the middle of a total reboot — one which mixes the old with the new.
The 2021 U.S. Open champion arrives at the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, Calif., with a new sponsor, Uniqlo. She also arrives with the desire to return to her old tennis — the free-hitting style that won her that U.S. Open title as an 18-year-old qualifier five years ago.
“At the start of the year, I wasn’t feeling too good about my game, and I was playing in a way I didn’t necessarily enjoy,” she said during a phone interview Wednesday, ahead of her opening match against Russian world No. 86 Anastasia Zakharova.
“I wanted to get back into being more aggressive.”
Raducanu and Francisco Roig, a longtime coach of Rafael Nadal, split at the end of this year’s Australian Open. Raducanu was frustrated with her game in Melbourne, especially with an elongated forehand swing that she appeared not to fully understand. After losing to Anastasia Potapova, she said in a news conference that she wanted to go back to her teenage playing style — by “hitting the ball to the corners and hard.”
She has brought back former coach Mark Petchey to work with her informally on this endeavor at Indian Wells, but Raducanu, now 23, is not the unknown quantity she was in 2021. She is the world No. 24 and has the added weight of expectation that any major winner carries, even though her trajectory since that U.S. Open win has been about what a rising young player might be expected to do, especially after a series of long-term or persistent injuries.
She has also remained one of the sport’s most commercially lucrative athletes, and Raducanu swapped Nike for Uniqlo last month, ending an eight-year partnership. Neither Raducanu nor Uniqlo has commented on the terms of the deal; Raducanu said that becoming a figurehead for a brand was a key factor.
“The feeling and the treatment that you get as being the only athlete in a brand’s clothes, it’s a great feeling,” she said. She will wear Uniqlo at a tournament for the first time Friday against Zakharova — as she bids to return to a game style that carried her to the very glory that has made it harder to reproduce that game style since.
Raducanu, who has almost five years on the WTA Tour and 149 matches in the bank since her win over Leylah Fernandez at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, is under no illusions about the challenge of emulating a style of play partly forged under freedom rather than pressure.
“You definitely appreciate the innocence of just coming straight on and playing free, not knowing anything that comes with it,” she said.
“And I think that it maybe is harder as you get older to kind of do the same things. But I’m doing what I can to move in that direction and play in that way. But it’s going to take a while because it’s been so many years of not necessarily doing that.”
Raducanu has had little opportunity to start the process in earnest since splitting with Roig. She reached the final of the Transylvania Open in Cluj, Romania, which was her first tournament after the Australian Open, but she looked exhausted during a one-sided loss to Sorana Cîrstea, and her first final since the 2021 U.S. Open fell flat.
Raducanu then played both the Qatar Open and Dubai Tennis Championships with an ongoing chest infection, losing both of her opening matches while suffering. She thinks she has shaken it off now and said, “In hindsight, I probably could have sat those ones out if I wasn’t feeling 100 percent.”
She said she’s no longer impacted by the foot problem that led to a truncated preseason — the rare time players can groove in technical or philosophical changes without the week-in, week-out pressure of executing during matches.
Hitting partner Alexis Canter, who worked with Raducanu in Romania, is in California with Petchey, who performed a similar role in 2025. The Tennis Channel commentator and analyst last year joined Raducanu’s team from the Miami Open, which follows Indian Wells, until the end of Wimbledon. The arrangement this time around is fluid, but Raducanu has said that working with people she knows and trusts helps her to re-center herself and express herself on court.
Emma Raducanu arrives at the BNP Paribas Open with an opportunity to resume the tennis she wants to play. (Robert Prange / Getty Images)
Laura Robson, a fellow former British prodigy and one-time world No. 27, said last week that it is “tough” rediscovering the fearlessness of youth.
This is partly due to the pressure dynamics of tennis. Players are able to play more freely when they are the underdog, and Robson suggested Raducanu could take encouragement from last year’s close matches against world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka. Raducanu lost both but had a set point against Sabalenka during a tiebreak at Wimbledon and forced a final-set tiebreak against her at the Cincinnati Open.
The ultimate aim for Raducanu is to get closer to the WTA’s leading lights, and the current top three of Sabalenka, Iga Świątek and Elena Rybakina accounted for all four of Raducanu’s Grand Slam losses last year. She won zero sets in those four matches, and won just seven games across three of them: the two against Świątek and one against Rybakina.
“When you’re playing someone who’s top five and who hits a ball that big, you think I might as well try and go toe to toe,” Robson, who is part of Sky Sports’ team at Indian Wells, told a group of reporters.
“So I think if she has that mindset in more matches and wants to get the job done two and two (6-2, 6-2) and try and hit winners, then it’s naturally going to feel like a more positive playing experience.
“Because you’re just going to sit up on the baseline a bit more and you’re going to try and take the ball on the rise a lot more.”
The challenge is doing this under the other kind of pressure in tennis — that of being the favorite. Raducanu has generally established herself as someone who beats players she ought to, but in 2026, she is yet to meet a player ranked above her and is 6-6 on the year as she seeks to rediscover what she perceives as her tennis identity.
“I wouldn’t say it’s as clear as other players,” Robson said of Raducanu’s game. “She kind of slots into half big-hitting, half counterpunching. She moves really well, which is a massive benefit to her. I think it’s still a work in progress for her, which is what she was finding as well.”
Raducanu said rediscovering her identity to her means “playing more on my terms, serving well, making returns and toughing it out on big points.”
“Just knowing I have a couple of weapons,” she said, adding that her serve is a shot she has been looking to improve.
Going forward, she may look to find herself by going it alone entirely. Raducanu has frequently changed coaches, having had seven permanent ones in five years — and is open to the idea of not having a single coach in charge, or being without one for a time, as her career progresses.
“I think there are periods where you’ve had a lot of information from different people, and you need to get back to being in touch with yourself, being in contact with your instincts,” she said.
“It’s very difficult when you have someone coming in telling you to do what they want you to do and put their stamp on it. So I think there are going to definitely be periods (without a coach), but I’m not saying I don’t want a coach or anything.
“It’s just I would rather not start something when I’m not 100 percent sure because, because I feel like even if it’s a trial, even if it’s not my fault, even if it’s the coach deciding to stop, then it kind of gets put on me, so I would rather not start that.”
Raducanu sees her new fashion sponsorship as another route to rediscovering herself. Many tennis players have spoken about their clothing impacting performance, echoing the immortal maxim from Deion Sanders, the only person to appear in both a Super Bowl and a World Series: “If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play good. If you play good, they pay good.”
Her recent switch reflects a trend in the business of tennis fashion, with more and more players leaving Nike for brands at which they are part of a much smaller group of tennis stars. Hard Court reported in January that Nike has stopped paying some players further down its roster, with their contracts extending only to clothes, and shoes in head-to-toe deals.
A representative for Nike did not respond to a request for comment on the report.
Ben Shelton, Jack Draper and Frances Tiafoe have joined On, Vuori and Lululemon over the last few years — the latter two from Nike, both of whom said during the U.S. Open in August that being the guy somewhere appealed to them.
Shelton meanwhile said in an interview two years ago: “I didn’t want to be one of 50 Nike guys.” At Uniqlo, Raducanu is the first female tennis player to become a global brand ambassador — joining Roger Federer and Kei Nishikori and actor Cate Blanchett. She is currently trialing shoes, as her deal with Uniqlo is not head to toe. The same is true of compatriot Draper, who announced a partnership with Asics on Thursday.
As part of the Uniqlo agreement, Raducanu will help to design her clothes, including a collaboration with British stylist and fashion designer Clare Waight Keller on a new range later this year.f
“Everything is tailored to you,” Raducanu said of being one of one in a brand’s portfolio.
“You feel special, like there’s a lot more attention to detail.
“Just being able to feel like what you’re wearing is unique … you feel like it matches you, rather than … not everyone has their own kit at Nike. And I think there are so many players, that some want to stand out — or they want to have something that fits them or suits them a little bit better — whether that’s clothes, whether that’s the environment or the support that you get one-to-one.”
Raducanu said she is “really grateful for everything that (Nike) did for me, too,” but said Uniqlo’s clothing gave her a “special feeling.”
“Whereas sometimes with bolder patterns or bolder colors and prints, it wasn’t necessarily my style.”
She added with a smile: “So there’s just a little bit of friction maybe internally, but you still wear it and you don’t think twice about it.”
A spokesperson for Nike did not respond to a request for comment but said via email in August the company is “supporting the game at every level and partnering with some of the most iconic and talented players in the world.”
“Since being in these clothes, I feel everything I put on is synonymous with myself,” Raducanu said of the Uniqlo deal. Her next challenge, beginning at Indian Wells, is to find the same feeling in her tennis.