Naomi Osaka and the tennis version of soccer's ‘new manager bounce'

New York Times

16 hours ago

Welcome back to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the stories behind the stories from the past week on court.
This week, Naomi Osaka found some form in Montreal as a home favorite extended her remarkable 2025, while Ben Shelton and Flavio Cobolli had a testy exchange in matching outfits, because that's how tennis rolls.
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Soccer has its 'new manager bounce.' Does tennis?
Clubs sometimes play better and win a few matches after they sack one manager and bring in another. Naomi Osaka might be feeling that now. She showed a marked improvement last fall, when she swapped Wim Fissette, now with Iga Świątek, for Patrick Mouratoglou.
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Then she went through a few injuries, which meant she got some practice but not many match reps; when she got to the match court, tight situations started slipping away from her. Heading into the Canadian Open in Montreal, six of her last eight defeats had come in three sets, with the decider either going 6-4 or 7-6 against her. One of the exceptions was a straight-sets defeat to Emma Raducanu in Washington D.C., which saw her split with Mouratoglou.
In interviews and news conferences, both had given the impression that communication was at times complicated. Osaka found it difficult to share her feelings, he said; Mouratoglou might feel he was wasting his time with her, having coached someone on the level of Serena Williams, Osaka said.
Świątek's former coach, Tomasz Wiktorowski, has joined Osaka for a trial period in Canada, and so far the bounce is bouncing. Osaka has reeled off four consecutive impressive wins in Canada, not necessarily in terms of who she is beating, but the manner in which she is doing it. Liudmila Samsonova and Jelena Ostapenko are good matchups for her, but she won a tight three-setter against Samsonova and dispatched Ostapenko by combining her always-prodigious ballstriking with improved defensive movement.
She's won 8 of 9 sets, too, the latest two coming in just 49 minutes against Anastasija Sevastova, 6-1, 6-0.
That win put Osaka into the quarterfinals of a WTA 1,000 event, the level below a Grand Slam, for the first time since she returned to tennis in January 2024, after giving birth to her first child. Bounce or not, she will take it.
Ben Shelton is having a good year. He's 29-16 during the 2025 campaign.
He lost in the semifinals of the Australian Open to Jannik Sinner, the round of 16 of the French Open to Carlos Alcaraz, and the quarterfinals of Wimbledon to Sinner once more. If those are the only two guys who can beat you in a Grand Slam then you're doing something right.
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That record gets an odd boost from two players, though. Shelton is 6-0 this year against Lorenzo Sonego and Brandon Nakashima, beating them thrice apiece. A record of 23-16 against everyone not named Sonego or Nakashima is slightly less shiny, but it indicates another stage in Shelton's growth: he seems to have mastered beating a certain level of player, and he learns how to beat those that have scrambled his brain.
Adrian Mannarino, the wily Frenchman, beat Shelton in the first week of the Australian Open in 2024. Shelton took care of him decisively during the Canadian Open last week. Sunday night in Toronto, he stormed back from 5-3 down in the third set to beat Flavio Cobolli, 6-4, 4-6, 7-6(1).
The two had some extended words at the net, after Cobolli gestured in frustration at losing the first point of the deciding tiebreak and Shelton thought it was personal. It wasn't, and the drama didn't go beyond two young men having it out in exactly matching outfits.
It's the upper-tier player that Shelton has trouble with, and while there's no shame in that, he is No. 7 in the live ATP Tour rankings now and a 3-6 record against top-10 players will make that his ceiling unless he starts to make inroads against them.
Until then, Sonego and Nakashima could do without seeing him for a while.
There's a long way to go before the U.S. legal system upends the rule prohibiting college players from collecting the prize money they earn at pro tournaments, but student-athletes got a step in that direction last week.
A federal judge in North Carolina granted class action status in the litigation involving Reese Brantmeier, the University of North Carolina student who brought the lawsuit, and Maya Joint, the pro player who was a student at the University of Texas last year.
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Both players had to leave tens of thousands of dollars on the table after participating in matches at pro tournaments and winning some, including at the U.S. Open. An American collegian can earn heaps of money — some NFL quarterbacks are collecting millions — for making brief appearances for sponsors, but they can't collect money they earn with their sweat, because that helps maintain their amateur status.
Brantmeier filed a lawsuit about this last year. The first step was to turn it into a class action suit by proving to the judge, among other things, that individual cases would be too complicated and that all the people are affected by the rule in basically the same way.
U.S. Chief District Judge Catherine Eagles ruled in favor of Brantmeier and Joint and cited two groups of potential plaintiffs.
The first includes any player who has competed in Division I tennis since March 19, 2020, or who could not compete because of NCAA prize money restrictions. The court order stated that it could include as many as 12,000 players. Then there are players who gave up prize money during that period.
This is all very welcome news for Joint and for someone like Oliver Tarvet, the Brit who attends Texas Christian University and who won more than $200,000 (£150,700) for reaching the second round at Wimbledon this year, but could only claim $10,000 (£7,300) before expenses.
🎾 ATP
📍Toronto: Canadian Open (1,000) featuring Ben Shelton, Taylor Fritz, Alexander Zverev, Alexei Popyrin.
📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV
🎾 WTA
📍Montreal, Canada: Canadian Open (1,000) featuring Victoria Mboko, Elena Rybakina, Elina Svitolina, Naomi Osaka.
📺 UK: Sky Sports; U.S.: Tennis Channel
Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments below as the men's and women's tours continue.