Comeback girl Sevastova soaks in time under sun
: On a summer day in Latvia in 2014, Anastasija Sevastova and Ronald Schmidt, her new boyfriend and tennis coach, were visiting her home city, Liepaja. They went to the beach, where Sevastova, 24 but already retired as a tour player, had something important to share.
“She got very serious,” Schmidt said. “And she told me she wanted to try tennis again.”
Four years later, she is in the semi-finals of the US Open facing Serena Williams under the lights and the microscope in a packed Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Latvia has risen to prominence in tennis in the last decade with Ernests Gulbis breaking into the ATP top 10 of the men’s tour; Jelena Ostapenko winning the women’s singles title at the 2017 French Open and Sevastova breaking into the top 20 and going deep at the US Open.
But the small Baltic nation was still a tennis backwater when Sevastova learned the game on red clay in Liepaja. No one in Sevastova’s family played tennis seriously. “I was hopeless, hopeless, twice hopeless,” said her mother, Diana Golovanova, who raised Sevastova as a single parent. Golovanova, a secondaryschool English teacher, had no interest in creating a champion.
But Sevastova’s grandmother was interested in channeling Sevastova’s energy into sports. With her natural athleticism, she could have gravitated to basketball or football. But it was tennis because her grandmother had some friends who played and because the only club of significance in Liepaja was near Sevastova’s home, tucked into the dunes near the Baltic Sea.
“Pure chance,” Golovanova said. “Some kids go to art school. It was tennis, because it was summer, close to the water and close to our house. So you just enroll your kid.” Sevastova played most of her winter tennis in the gymnasium in a secondary school where her mother was a teacher. It is also the same school where Ostapenko’s mother and primary coach, Jelena Jakovleva, attended school as a youngster.
But it soon became clear that Sevastova would need to leave home to progress. Gulbis, who was from an affluent family in Riga, was boarding at Niki Pilic’s tennis academy in Munich, where a teenage Novak Djokovic was also training. Sevastova eventually followed the same path at age 14, returning regularly to Latvia to complete her schooling.
“Ernests was there; some other Latvian players were there,” Sevastova said. “Pilic was kind of the ‘in’ thing.”
Golovanova went with her to Munich for her first tryout. She said that Pilic, a former French Open champion, came on court when Sevastova was rallying with some of his coaches. “He had never met her or heard anything about her,” Golovanova said. “She was just a girl from the middle of nowhere, and he says, ‘Top 50. Top 30 if she tries hard.’ I mean, how could he know that?”
As it turns out, Pilic was being conservative. Sevastova, seeded 19th at the US Open, has become a fixture in the top 20 after a career high of No. 15 last October.