NEW YORK – It sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?

Just ask Coco Gauff.

The American tennis world is crazy about Coco. And then a certain Emma Navarro sweeps her off Centre Court at Wimbledon. Barely a month later, she knocks her out of the US Open at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the place that was to be the defending champion’s living room for the next ten years or so.

One moment she’s all shy and soft-spoken, telling sweet stories about her 90-something grandmother who sits at home in Connecticut, watches her matches over and over and then calls her to motivate her. The next moment Navarro is attacking Zheng Qinwen, the Olympic champion and Australian Open finalist, reinforcing her previous comments that Zheng doesn’t respect Navarro or the sport of tennis.

As Navarro, the 23-year-old former NCAA champion from the University of Virginia, climbed the rankings, the word “consistent” kept sticking with her. Something about the human nature of her game, the hard (but not too hard), flat power with which she batted ball after ball off her racket. The beauty of her game, her economical and elegant movements and the subtle mowing of her forehand, goes almost unnoticed.

She is very reliable, but that doesn’t even begin to describe her. Secret is more accurate.

Sixteen months ago, she was ranked No. 121 in the world. A year ago, she was No. 61. Last fall, she played the smallest WTA Tour events she could, even entering some ITF tournaments one level below the WTA Tour. She won two of the tournaments she entered and went deep in most of them, earning enough points to enter the 2024 Australian Open as the No. 27 seed.

There was another advantage.

“I don’t know a single tennis player, whether recreational, junior or at any level, who plays worse when they win often,” Patrick Hieber said in an interview. Hieber is the founder of LTP Tennis, the Charleston Academy where Navarro has been training since she was 14. He is also one of her coaches.

“Winning a lot is really good for you.”

Navarro won her first WTA title in Hobart, Tasmania in 2023 (Steve Bell / Getty Images)

For Navarro, it became something of a habit. She started the year by reaching the semifinals in Auckland and then won her first WTA Tour tournament in Hobart. Simply “consistent” players don’t usually manage that, at least not at the top levels of women’s tennis.

Reliable players generally can’t pirouetting out of corners, running back into a point with one shot, or hitting passing shots that whiz past Gauff-caliber opponents and scare the lines before they can turn their heads. As Maria Sakkari, a top-10 player, put it to Ben Shelton, her partner in an exhibition match with Navarro at Indian Wells, Navarro is more stealthy than safe.

“Yes, Ben, she is so unobtrusive, really good.”

Pretty much everyone knows how good she is now, including Navarro. When she was up one set in the second set of her quarterfinal match against Paula Badosa on Tuesday but then trailed 5-1, Navarro felt she didn’t need to work overtime.

She could do it right now.

“If I could apply pressure and get her to think a little bit about her serve, maybe I could sneak back into the match,” she said.

“Sometimes you stand on the court and imagine playing a third set. When I was out there, I didn’t imagine playing a third set.”

Drive is the key word here. For Navarro, who was born in New York but grew up in Charleston, it’s learned behavior.

Consistency was her default mode. That fit well with the other trait that those who know her best use to describe her: a perfectionist. Both sound like good qualities for a professional tennis player.

Not so much.

Tennis is a game for perfectionists. The best players lose almost half of the points they play. Win 53 percent and you could be the best in the world.

In the case of Navarro, who could imitate the human backboard as a little girl, perfectionism drove her to be more consistent. Essentially, tennis requires players to hit the ball over the net and into the court. Navarro could do that all day long, and it felt damn good.

That was the model that Peter Ayers, her coach at LTP, inherited when Navarro came under his responsibility as a young teenager. She did so many things so well. Such a pure ball-swinger. So much commitment, the desire to be the best tennis player she could be. She was fast. She even liked training in the gym.

She hated to miss though. That was a problem.

Navarro’s successes at Wimbledon and the US Open have catapulted her into the wider tennis world (Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)

A good problem to have, because she didn’t miss very often, but the consistency it allowed and the luck it brought were a dangerous thing. Ayers knew it wouldn’t get her very far.

“We had to redefine mistakes. Not just the ball that goes too far or too long or goes in the net, but also, ‘Hey, when you hit the ball right there in the court, that was a mistake. A worse mistake than missing it by six inches. And that’s why,'” he said.

A good opponent would smash many of the balls returned by Navarro.

“It’s a bigger mistake to let your opponent take all the confidence that comes from being allowed to do that than to try it yourself,” Ayers said.

This struggle continues to this day, he said. The higher the level, the more you have to compromise your control in the name of aggression.

Ayers, 51, has been around long enough to know that the key to coaching – especially in an individual sport – is finding what works best for the individual player and working with that, rather than trying to impose a strict approach.

Like many top junior players, Navarro tried attending high school online for a while to have more flexibility for the training, practices and travel that junior tennis requires. She pretty much hated it. She was a social teenager living a relatively normal life at a normal high school. If her tennis suffered, so be it.

However, that was not the case. She was willing to get up in the pre-dawn darkness to train before school started and then return to the field for several more hours after school.

“She wanted the brick-and-mortar experience,” Ayers said. “That’s what she needed and wanted, and we made it happen.”

Navarro defeated Coco Gauff at both Wimbledon and the US Open (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

As a coach, sometimes you just get lucky. What the 5’7″ Navarro may lack in size, she makes up for in her dedication to becoming the fittest, strongest athlete she can be. She has worked for years with a coach named Brent Thacker and has the strength and speed needed to showcase her skills.

She didn’t play any other sports seriously growing up and lacked a natural sense of how to compete against an opponent. She was great at finding her spot, seeing the ball come over the net and returning it. She was less good at looking over the net and understanding the dynamics of the interaction between her and the player on the other side of the court.

Ayers and Thacker let her get creative. They taught her how to mark someone on a basketball court to react to movement. She boxed and worked with a punching bag. She learned to keep her head up and see what was coming, something that isn’t always easy for tennis players whose opponents are 25 yards away.

“You don’t feel how intense that interaction is,” Ayers explained. “How you’re on time and more aware of the interaction with the person on the other side of the network.”

Next up on the other side of the net is Aryna Sabalenka, the No. 2 in the world and the best hitter in the world. Their fight could feel like the boxing matches that Ayers and Thacker put Navarro through. Sabalenka can get wild, though, which could also be a chance for that innate durability to steal the win for Navarro.

“I’m trying to get some longer points,” she said. “Make her hit another ball.”

(Top photo: Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images)