By learning to believe in her attacking game, Iga Swiatek is realizing just how good she can be

MATCH POINT: Swiatek ends Gauff's bid

What are the telltale signs of when a player is locked in? Every pro is a little different, of course, but over the past month we’ve been getting a pretty good idea of how Iga Swiatek, who beat Coco Gauff for her 14th straight victory on Monday, plays when she’s in the zone.

The first thing you may have noticed is how big Swiatek is swinging, how hard she is hitting, and yet at the same time how little risk she seems to be taking. Her shots go for winners, but she doesn’t have to aim all that close to the lines to create them. And when she hits the ball in the direction of her opponents, they have a hard time catching up to it. Swiatek isn’t belting the ball 100 m.p.h., but she’s taking it early and off the bounce and trying to do something forceful with every swing. Her opponents, by contrast, are always rushing and under pressure. Swiatek is aggressive and under control at the same time—an enviable and elusive combination.

The second thing you may have noticed is how much closer her match with Gauff seemed, at least until the final few games, than the 6-3, 6-1 score would indicate. Gauff stood up to Swiatek from the baseline for much of this match, had a couple of break points in the first set, and tried her best to disrupt Swiatek’s rhythm with slices, drops, and the occasional serve and volley. Yet she was gradually worn down, and pressed to do try for too much just to stay in the rallies. By the middle of the second set, the match had gone from a tight contest to a blowout.

Swiatek will take over the top ranking from Ash Barty, and for the moment she has also taken over her role as the WTA’s player to beat. This was someone who was struggling to hold back tears in a lot of her matches in 2021.

What has changed this year? We can start with her new coach, Tomasz Witkorowki. In the off-season, he advised her to swing more freely and play with a more relentless aggression. Swiatek, who considered herself a clay-courter first and foremost, says she was skeptical of the change at first, but she has obviously bought in. She saw the game speeding up around her, and realized she had to speed up with it.

“Right now I have more moments when I can feel that I have nothing to lose, and going all in,” Swiatek said earlier this month. “Before, really, I didn’t want to take that risk, because I didn’t want to be that kind of player who is just going to shoot the balls and we’re going to see if it’s going to be in or out.

“I wanted always to be solid and be the kind of clay-court player who is going to play topspin and stay back, but really, right now tennis is getting faster and faster. You can see that in tournaments.”

“Players who are attacking and leading are winning. I wanted to also learn how to do that.”

Learning to believe in her attacking game has led Swiatek to start believing she can do all kinds of other things. Before Indian Wells, she said she never thought of herself as the type of player who could win two tournaments in a row. Then she did. Before this month, she said she had never thought of herself as having a chance to reach No. 2 or No. 1 in the world, at least not yet, not as a 20-year-old. She reached No. 2 last week, and No. 1 this week.

The zone is just that: A place that players move in and out of, and Swiatek will eventually come out of hers. But it’s exciting to see how well she’s hitting the ball right now, and exciting to see someone in the process of realizing just how good they be when they trust themselves to change.