{"id":564327,"date":"2026-04-04T15:26:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T15:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/564327\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T15:26:14","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T15:26:14","slug":"wim-fissette-iga-swiatek-and-why-coaching-a-generational-talent-is-a-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/564327\/","title":{"rendered":"Wim Fissette, Iga \u015awi\u0105tek and why coaching a generational talent is a challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

After all these years spent coaching some of the best players to lift a tennis racket, Wim Fissette<\/a> knows and accepts the rules of the game.<\/p>\n

When results don\u2019t match a player\u2019s expectations, the player can\u2019t fire herself. If other members of the team \u2014 a trainer, a sports psychologist, a physiotherapist \u2014 have been around longer and have a deeper relationship with her, then the axe falls on the coach.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of the reasons Fissette, one of the most respected and successful coaches on the WTA Tour, was not surprised late last month when he learned that Iga \u015awi\u0105tek<\/a>, the reigning Wimbledon champion and a six-time Grand Slam winner, no longer required his services.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some teams that can stay really calm under, let\u2019s say, difficult conditions. Others feel like something needs to change.\u201d Fissette said during an interview this week.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs in every sport, it\u2019s always first the coach that has to go. At the highest level in sports, this is part of the job. You have to accept that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, these moments are never easy. Fissette not only helped \u015awi\u0105tek win her first Wimbledon title. Together, they started a tennis journey that \u015awi\u0105tek wants to continue after Fissette has gone, using the foundations of her tennis past to construct her tennis future.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to be a wall on the court,\u201d she said during an interview with Sport.pl this week, ahead of hiring Francisco Roig to replace Fissette. Roig is best known for his 18 years with \u015awi\u0105tek\u2019s idol, Rafael Nadal, who this week dropped by his academy in Manacor, Mallorca, to give her some pointers on her forehand.<\/p>\n

\u015awi\u0105tek and Fissette have built most of that wall. But the job is not finished.<\/p>\n

Fissette said that from the moment he joined team \u015awi\u0105tek in the fall of 2024, he knew that coaching her would be one of the most challenging tasks of his career \u2014 because she is a generational talent.<\/p>\n

\u015awi\u0105tek, 24, is a sublime player. When Fissette started working with her, she had five Grand Slam titles, the longest women\u2019s win-streak this century (37) and 125 weeks as world No. 1 in the bank. For \u015awi\u0105tek, world No. 2 in late 2024, anything less than winning more Grand Slam titles and a tilt for world No. 1 would be considered a failure.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were almost unbeatable for a few years,\u201d Fissette said. \u201cThe expectations are going to be super high. Every loss will hurt extra. I was aware of the difficulties in this project. It was impossible to do better. But I was still really happy that I took the challenge, and happy with what we achieved. Iga is such an extraordinary player and athlete.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fissette was also the only member of her team not from Poland. He had to coach \u015awi\u0105tek in English, a second language for both of them, if not a third.<\/p>\n

The language barrier became something of a metaphor. On a tight-knit, mostly Polish performance team that includes \u015awi\u0105tek\u2019s psychologist and near-constant travel companion, Daria Abramowicz, and her physiotherapist Maciej Ryszczuk, Fissette arrived as a natural outsider.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery word I say is new to her,\u201d he said. \u201cOut of respect for Iga, I don\u2019t want to go deep into that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a social media post announcing Fissette\u2019s dismissal, \u015awi\u0105tek wrote: \u201cAfter many months of working together with my coach I\u2019ve decided to take a different path.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an intense time full of challenges and many important experiences. I\u2019m grateful for his support, experience, and everything we achieved together \u2014 including one of my biggest dreams in sport.<\/p>\n

\u201cWim, thank you for this time and for the lessons I\u2019ve learned thanks to you. I wish you all the best \u2014 both professionally and personally.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the interview with Sport.pl, \u015awi\u0105tek said she \u201cdidn\u2019t feel fully secure in my game lately, and wasn\u2019t at my best in terms of confidence, which was also visible on court.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am now focusing on getting back to the skills I have always had and that helped me most in difficult moments, because those situations are inevitably part of competing. At the same time, regarding parting ways with Wim, this is not the kind of decision someone like me makes based on a single loss. I would never act hastily. While I may sometimes come across as emotional, in reality I approach decisions in a very rational and considered way, always taking the time to reflect rather than acting impulsively.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the first months of their partnership at the end of 2024, Fissette said, they found ways to negotiate the communication blocks. \u015awi\u0105tek knew she needed new solutions, and that their results would take time to bear fruit.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n The pinnacle for the partnership of Iga \u015awi\u0105tek and Wim Fissette was her 2025 Wimbledon title. (Robert Prange \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

She showed up at last year\u2019s Australian Open playing differently than she had during most of the previous three seasons with Tomasz Wiktorowski. Wiktorowski had preached a direct, simple, first-strike style, which smoothed out some of the contours of her game that made her such an electrifying talent in her younger years.<\/p>\n

It worked until it became too easy to figure out. Tension, opponents, or both would put \u015awi\u0105tek into uncomfortable positions. As things got tighter, she would hit harder, and one or two errors would turn into 10 or 12.<\/p>\n

Fissette wanted her to play with more patience, to put more shape and spin on the ball, to aim at bigger targets rather than at the lines, and to play with more variety. No one in the women\u2019s game can match the jumping, revving forehand or the arcing backhand that she possesses on her best days, so why not use them to construct points, rather than trying to end them by playing flat?<\/p>\n

The strategy helped her come within a point of the 2025 Australian Open final, but she lost to Madison Keys, the eventual champion, in a match tiebreak. \u201cI see my game every day,\u201d \u015awi\u0105tek said during an interview after that tournament.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to see the changes because they\u2019re little. I know. They only seem big on a bigger horizon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fissette and \u015awi\u0105tek left Australia filled with optimism. But then \u015awi\u0105tek went to the Qatar Open and the BNP Paribas Open, tournaments she had dominated, and did not lift their trophies. After losses at those events, Fissette noticed a familiar dynamic among great players. When a change in approach makes results worse, they tend to fall back on what made them great in the first place. They have to learn the hard way that it won\u2019t work anymore. And \u015awi\u0105tek was not just changing her approach through new ideas, but trying to resurrect old parts of her tennis identity at the same time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at the best players in the world in the past 20 years, it\u2019s, \u2018How can I learn to improve and to develop?\u2019\u201d Fissette said, noting the way Roger Federer, Nadal and Novak Djokovic never stopped evolving.<\/p>\n

\u201cEspecially after losses, it was difficult to look at the development instead of like, OK, \u2018Let\u2019s just keep trying to do what was working.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Initially, that dynamic helped Fissette\u2019s cause. \u015awi\u0105tek\u2019s return to overhitting led her to something like rock bottom. Coco Gauff thrashed her in the Madrid Open semifinals and Danielle Collins rolled her in the third round of the Italian Open. Crushing experiences on her favorite surface, clay, led her to adopt tactical changes. She may have lost to Aryna Sabalenka in the French Open semifinals, but she did so playing the tennis she wanted to play. It was growth.<\/p>\n

By the middle of July, \u015awi\u0105tek was a champion at Wimbledon, the tournament where nearly all tennis greats rise, and where she never thought she would win. The technical changes Fissette asked for on her serve, her patience for manipulating points and slow unearthing of her old feel and touch coalesced into a dominant title run.<\/p>\n

But despite two more titles that summer and early fall, at the Cincinnati and Korean Opens, \u015awi\u0105tek again found herself caught in a tennis quandary through the end of last year and the start of this one. She and Fissette\u2019s vision for her tennis was taking hold, but she could not get out of the way of her serve, which did not bring the easy points and releases of pressure that it did on quicker courts.<\/p>\n

Her first-serve-in percentages got too low. She started playing basically every point from neutral, tiring her legs and heaping pressure on her baseline game. It took just a few points on either side to turn a close set into a one-sided disaster. And worst of all, she could see the problems, but not fix them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kind of knew what I\u2019m doing wrong. I was stuck in doing it wrong rather than actually solving it,\u201d she said after a China Open loss to Emma Navarro that ended with a 6-0 reverse.<\/p>\n

Once again, she was caught between two styles. During matches, she seemed far more engaged with Abramowicz, in Polish, than with Fissette, who increasingly found it difficult to get through to her. At this year\u2019s BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells and Miami Open, \u015awi\u0105tek and Abramowicz appeared to be yelling at one another during matches.<\/p>\n

\"Iga<\/p>\n

\n Practices toward the end of the Iga \u015awi\u0105tek-Wim Fissette partnership were marked by disagreements. (NurPhoto \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Fissette said he understood.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe has been working with the same people for a lot of years, and she\u2019s been super successful for years,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s normal that in, let\u2019s say, challenging times, that she kind of goes back to these people or maybe wants more from these people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following the loss that spelled the end of her partnership with Fissette, to compatriot Magda Linette in Miami, \u015awi\u0105tek said that tennis had become \u201ccomplicated\u201d and she felt \u201cchaos\u201d in her mind.<\/p>\n

In her announcement that she was parting ways with Fissette, she said the rest of her performance team would remain in place.<\/p>\n

During an interview at the U.S. Open last September, when the tennis future they were building together was brighter than it looked at its end, Fissette said something about \u015awi\u0105tek\u2019s decision to embrace change that resonates as much now as it did then.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes it just takes a hard time,\u201d Fissette said. \u201cIt takes something that happens to make you do it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After all these years spent coaching some of the best players to lift a tennis racket, Wim Fissette…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":564328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,1794,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-564327","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-sports-business","10":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}