Britain’s new tennis heroine and US Open champion Emma Raducanu may have settled temporarily for former British number one Jeremy Bates as her new coach.
Raducanu has arrived in Indian Wells where she is expected to participate for the first time since winning the US Open and pocketing mouth watering largesse. A video released by the organisers shows her training in front of Californian mountains and palm trees under the watchful eye of Jeremy Bates.
Bates is in Indian Wells with Katie Boulter, the British No6, whom he has been steering for several years. But he is also the Lawn Tennis Association’s national coach, so has a general watching brief over the leading British women.
Raducanu will be playing only her third tournament on the WTA Tour. She lost in the first round of both previous events first at Nottingham against compatriot Harriet Dart, and then in San Jose on her return to the tour after Wimbledon.
Raducanu’s coaching situation is a major talking point in British tennis. She has already split with two coaches this year after short but apparently successful runs the first being Nigel Sears, who assisted her during the grass-court season, and the second being Andrew Richardson, who supervised her mind-boggling US Open triumph.
On both occasions, it was a surprise when the Raducanu family decided to end the partnership. But then, even during her junior days, she tended to move quickly between coaches and sometimes even to use multiple coaches at once. At one point, a rumour went around that her father Ian wanted her to have a different specialist coach for each shot.
Could Bates be a contender to work with Raducanu on an individual level? Perhaps. He knows the game inside-out, both from his own experience as the best British male of the early 1990s and from many years coaching on behalf of the LTA.
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Raducanu is expected to appoint an official coach at the end of the season, as she prepares for her first full year on the tour.
The Emma Raducanu bounce is officially taking hold with tangible investment, after the Government announced a £30 million pledge to revive thousands of public tennis courts across the country.