Danielle Collins desires to make one thing abundantly clear. She’s serious about this whole quitting tennis thing.
Really.
The passionate 30-year-old from Florida, who reached the semifinals of the Miami Open, her closest home tournament on the tennis tour, heard all the doubts.
Sloane Stephens, the 2017 U.S. Open champion who has known and played with Collins since childhood, chalked it up to post-defeat frustration when Collins first blurted out that she was fed up with the year after a heartbreaking three-set loss to Iga Świątek in Australia in January. . Jared Jacobs, the coach who has been in Collins’ dugout for the last two Grand Slams, still doesn’t fully consider that can occur.
“We’ll see,” he says.
Other friends from the trip come up, shrug and ask, “Why?” – partly because they know, so long as health allows, how significantly better than they could be.
None of this matters. Not as much fear as Świątek No. 1 in Melbourne gave the world. Not her semi-final performance in the tournament just under Grand Slam level, nor the money she leaves on the table in the form of likely future winnings and sponsorships. Everything was great, but he’s had enough of it, or at least that can occur at the end of the season.
Collins says he will quit tennis at the end of the year (Shi Tang/Getty Images)
“I’ve been doing this for a while,” he says, although in relative terms that is not the case. She played professionally only two seasons longer than Coco Gauff, who is 10 years younger than her.
Whatever. It actually seems like time has passed and she or he has other goals, other things she wants to realize, other ways to spend her time apart from traveling the world, staying in hotel rooms and obsessing over the trajectory of a blurry aircraft. yellow ball and whether her rheumatoid arthritis would allow her to even play on the court the next day. He wants to start out a family, sooner relatively than later.
“I love what I’ve done, this opportunity and the doors that open to it, but it’s not easy and I’m a homebody,” says Collins, an Australian Open 2022 finalist. “I’m a simple person. I like to water the plants and walk the dog, and in the morning I go for a coffee and make sure the bed is made. I have my special washing powder and my small cosmetics in the cabinets and, man, if I had to be at home all the time, every day, I would never get bored of it. I like reading my book. It doesn’t take much to make me happy.”
Surfing and yoga help. More of this is on the way.
This is probably an excellent time to indicate that it will be a terrible idea for any of Collins’ upcoming opponents to mistake this for a scarcity of contention at this point or for the rest of the season. She continues to hit the ball uncompromisingly, especially along with her backhand, fiddling with a mashing-the-floor style that may overwhelm opponents, as Caroline Garcia, ranked twenty third in the world, did in the quarterfinals on Wednesday. Collins blew her to pieces in two clean sets, 6-3, 6-2, just days after Garcia defeated Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff.
Last month, Katie Volynets served set and break during a match in Austin, Texas. The arthritis in her back was so severe that she needed to throw the ball in front of her because she couldn’t bend back to serve.
Irrelevant. She stormed back to win the second set in a tie-break and the third set 6-0, deciding in the seemingly waning moments that since she was already outside in the gray cold, she might as well get rid of the adrenaline of the pain and win.
“There’s very little you can do when a powerful player gets angry,” Christo van Rensburg, tournament director in Austin, said of Collins that day.
Collins (left) in the Miami Open quarterfinals (Robert Prange/Getty Images)
On Monday, Collins spent 89 minutes dismantling Sorana Cirstea of Romania in the round of 16, beating her 6-3, 6-2 on Butch Buchholz’s cozy home court at Hard Rock Stadium. There was a gaggle of noisy Romanian fans on the pitch, cheering for Cirstea and criticizing Collins in the late afternoon.
As Collins finished the final point of a hard-fought but ultimately one-sided victory, she put a finger to her lips to silence them and went to the net for a handshake. She grabbed her bag and left the stadium alone for the rest of the evening. Her box was empty. No parents. No coach. She flies alone. To put it simply, regardless that this is likely her last home tournament, and her farewell season is actually going significantly better at this point than other players (Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray) who are attempting to say some final season glory.
This has at all times been the dynamic in the Collins family. Tennis is what she does, not who she is, and her parents can be just as proud of her if she worked behind the money register, she insists.
Her mother was a kindergarten teacher and her father ran a small landscaping business. Her father, who earned a living mowing rights until he retired at age 84, would wake up and play soccer along with her before school, and would get friends to babysit her at the local courts in St. Petersburg, Florida.
However, the family couldn’t afford the best bus or travel across the country, much less abroad, when she was a youngster. Tennis was all about getting an education, which she achieved, graduating from the University of Virginia as a two-time NCAA champion.
When she told her parents she had a probability to turn into an expert, they suggested she pursue higher education as a substitute. She won over $7 million in prize money, yet never once felt like she was playing for anyone apart from herself.
Their response to her planned retirement? Great, they need grandchildren.
“They’re probably saying, ‘It’s about damn time,'” he says.
If she hadn’t been a tennis player, it probably would have happened earlier, for reasons of desire and health. After years of doctors largely ignoring her complaints of heavy periods and intense period pain, she finally found one who listened and accurately diagnosed endometriosis, a disease wherein tissue just like the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus.
After surgery to remove the tissue, the doctor told her that getting pregnant could also help suppress the symptoms, nevertheless it had no effect on her profession, so she continued acting. After October it will now not be an issue.
She still plans to travel and has already began. After being eliminated from the Australian Open, she and her boyfriend went mountaineering in Tasmania amongst giant gum trees in the swamps. They’re not as big as the redwoods, but they’re close. She planned a visit to South Africa for December.
Will she miss tennis?
Maybe? She’s the kind of skilled who can enjoy the feeling of hitting the ball in a game with a weekend warrior, but she’s jealous of baseball, basketball and football players who travel on private or chartered jets, play at home and have long off-seasons. She would really like to have home games. She doesn’t, regardless that she has tennis courts at her house and a number of other others down the road.
“If the tennis format had been different, it would have been a very different story and I probably would have reconsidered it,” she said of her impending retirement. “But the way this sport works is very difficult.”
