Growing pains
Eugenie Bouchard was the golden girl when she stormed on the scene, but there have been bumps along the way
It was always going to be a tough act to follow. The Eugenie Bouchard of 2014 burst onto the tennis scene so spectacularly, doing no worse than a semifinal appearance in three of the four Grand Slams, including a final at Wimbledon, that the bar was set pretty high for the Bouchard of 2015.
“It’s unrealistic at this point to think, when she just turned 21, with the year she had last year, to think that she just needs to do better, better, better all the time,” Sylvain Bruneau, Canada’s Fed Cup captain, said. “She’s not a robot.”
Indeed, Bouchard is not an emotionless tennis-playing machine, as was demonstrated recently in Indian Wells and Miami, where the Montreal native suffered disappointing losses to lesser-ranked players.
At the BNP Paribas Openin the California desert, it was a three-set loss in the fourth round to qualifier Lesia Tsurenko, ranked No. 85 at the time. At the Miami Open, it was a second-round loss to Tatjana Maria, ranked No. 113 in the world.
Even on different coasts, the image of Bouchard smashing her racket, slumping forward in her chair and burying her face in a towel showed a player frustrated. There were tears on and off the court. They were upsets.
“I think I let emotions get the best of me today,” Bouchard told reporters after her loss at Indian Wells in which she was broken nine times and let a 3-0 lead in the third set slip away. “I don’t usually do that. I usually pride myself on not doing that. It’s been a while since I felt that emotional in a match and after.
“You know, sometimes I guess it happens, but it’s definitely kind of a learning type match,” she said.
These results are disappointing for a player ranked No. 7 in the world, but not all that uncommon for a rising star still carving her path.
For the first time, Bouchard entered the season a top-10 player, which comes with pressure. Then there’s the additional media attention, an ever-growing fan base and public appearances. (You can’t turn down playing with Justin Bieber at Will Ferrell’s celebrity tennis exhibition.) She recently hired a new coach Sam Sumyk, which is a relationship that can take time to develop, said Robert Bettauer, TV tennis analyst and CEO of Pacific Institute for Sport Excellence.
“I think it’s natural that there’s now a phase where she’s got to digest all that and not all of it’s pretty,” Bettauer said. “But first of all that’s the nature of competitive sport, and it’s also the nature of growing up and I think all of that’s happening before our eyes.”
In fact, parts of her game have not been pretty. Against Tsurenko, Bouchard committed 74 unforced errors; in Miami, Bouchard had five double-faults and won less than 50% of her service points. The volume of service breaks can be debilitating. Her first serve percentage, to date, is 56.4%, the lowest among top10 players.
But despite the unexpected losses and a nagging injuries — Bouchard was recovering from an arm injury entering Indian Wells and had an abdomen injury prior to Miami — her results aren’t actually that dissimilar from 2014. At the Australian Open, Bouchard went one fewer round, a quarter-final exit versus a semifinal in 2014.
Bouchard suffered a surprising second-round loss to Mona Barthel in Antwerp following this year’s Australian Open. But the previous year, she also made an early exit from her followup tournament in Doha, losing in the opening round to Bethanie Mattek-Sands, a lower-ranked player.
Bouchard has played less this year, a symptom of being injured, which is an obstacle she didn’t face last year when she played Dubai and Acapulco along with Doha prior to the WTA premier mandatory events in Indian Wells and Miami.
In 2014, Bouchard was ousted in the fourth round and the second round in those two events, respectively. Sound familiar?
The tennis season is long, and Bouchard has plenty of time to rebound from poor results, which Bruneau said could be learning experiences that serve as a “trigger” to enable a player to turn the event into a positive.
But to achieve positive results, Bettauer said, Bouchard would need to steady her wavering confidence.
“There’s only one solution to confidence — and that is some success,” he said.
Enter the Family Circle Cup. Originally not on Bouchard’s schedule, she received a wild card into the Charleston tournament next week.
Poised to be the No. 1 seed, Bouchard has an 8-2 record at the event, making it to the quarters in 2013 and falling just short in the semifinals last year. If the Family Circle Cup has been a place of positive results in years past, perhaps Bouchard is hoping it can provide a boost this year.
With the clay season approaching, she’ ll enter the portion of the tour with a significant amount of ranking points to defend. She won her first WTA title in Nuremberg, Germany last year in the leadup to the French Open, where she ascended to a second straight major semifinal. Then, of course, there was the unforgettable run at Wimbledon.
As much as it may be unfair or unrealistic to measure Bouchard’s breakthrough season against this one, it was inevitably going to happen — many wondering if she would incur a sophomore slump. This season it’s evident she’s going through some growing pains, and that includes some tough losses, but the more important measure will be how she moves past them.
“She’s working hard, she’s doing what she needs to do,” Bruneau said. “She’ ll learn from it and she’ll become a better player from it.”
There’s only one solution to confidence, and that is success