Raducanu drops coach who led her to U.S. Open triumph

Seems like a smart move. She is focused on making it to the top and staying there. Hopefully her former coach got a healthy severance and they departed on good terms.

deja vu ?

A similar aged You-know-who dumped her coach too after winning her first major

And I'm sure she'll get exactly the same amount of criticism here that Naomi Osaka got when she did the exact same thing a few years back.

Seems like a bad move. Stick with the people that helped you to succeed.

Some differences with Osaka in that Raducanu has come from nowhere and won a tournament in which the highest seed she beat was number 11. Those are very fortunate circumstances and are very unlikely to ever happen again. Osaka was already identified as the leading prospect and was 20th seed when she first won the US Open. 20th may sound meh, but it is way higher than a qualifier. Osaka also won by outplaying Serena Williams. There was the Williams meltdown with the umpire in the final, but it began with Williams' coach illegally sending her signals from the stands as a desparation move against Osaka outplaying Williams.

Osaka already had a coach who was used to the tour and would have background knowledge on the season's schedule and how to prep for tournaments. The coach Raducanu is dismissing here sounds like a much lower level person who just happened to be there when the fairy tale happened. Anyway, Raducanu now has two challenges, firstly to play well in matches where she is now under pressure to beat everyone every time and secondly to beat high seeds in major tournaments. The coaching grass may not prove to be greener with her new coach, but I think its true that her situation has completely changed.

Following on from what the above poster says, Osaka had been playing in Grand Slam tournaments for THREE years before winning her first one at US2018. And much of those three years was with the coach she fired after her second Grand Slam title.

With Raducanu, her coach was always on a short term basis, and she had only been on the WTA tour for a few weeks, starting from the week before Wimbledon. Hardly the same situation. The coach does not have experience with high level WTA tennis and they were not expecting her to go far. As she says, she now needs a very experienced coach because her circumstances have completely changed. She's no longer a player who needs to qualify for tournaments.

It will be interesting to see how it all turns out.