'I want to hug her': Coco Gauff offers message to younger self

Saturday marked a special anniversary in the life and career of Coco Gauff, and the US Open champion served up a sweet message to her younger self on social media to commemorate it.

Gauff, then just 15, won her first career WTA singles title in Linz, Austria as a lucky loser on Oct. 14, 2019, and four years later, the now 19-year-old Grand Slam winner revisited how far she's come since that milestone.

"I want to hug her," Gauff wrote on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, adding an emotional emoji for emphasis.

Having burst onto the scene earlier in 2019 at Wimbledon, where she beat Venus Williams en route to the fourth round as a qualifier, Gauff's win in Linz propelled her into the WTA's Top 100 for the first time, and made her the WTA's youngest title-winner since 2004.

But the simple social media sentiment she shared is the latest instance of Gauff reflecting on her growth as a tennis player and person this year, particularly in the aftermath of what many called a long-awaited coronation in Queens.

"It's been a long journey to this point," Gauff said after beating Aryna Sabalenka in three sets to win the US Open. "I wasn't a fully developed player, and I still think I have a lot of development to go at that moment. I think people were putting a lot of pressure on me to win. I felt that at 15 I had to win a Slam at 15. I think that was, you know, not the mistake, because everything led to this moment so there was no mistakes. But that was, like, a little bit of the pressure that I was feeling.

"Now I just realize that I just need to go out there and try my best. I mean, it was to the point where I remember I lost when I was 17 and there was a stat, they were like, 'Oh, she's not going to win a Slam before Serena's age.' It was stuff like that that I felt like I had a time limit on when I should win one, and if I won one after a certain age it wouldn't be an achievement.

"It's just crazy the amount of things that I have heard or seen about myself, but I'm really happy of how I've been able to manage it all."