Jermaine Jenkins, a former hitting partner for Venus Williams who has been a national development coach at the U.S. Tennis Association since 2019, has seen a lot of young, promising talent the past seven years.
He still remembers the moment that he first saw Akasha Urhobo.
It was 2022, at a small tournament in Florence, S.C. on the ITF World Tennis Tour, about three rungs down from the WTA Tour. Urhobo, who had come to the tournament from her home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was 15.
She had one of the stranger approaches to modern tennis that Jenkins had seen in a long, long time.
“I just remember watching her from a distance and being like: ‘Damn, she’s coming in on everything,’” Jenkins recalled during a recent interview.
“Like … You’re not even trying to build a point! Just a little patience, you know? But, she was having legit chances at making volleys as she’s coming in. I was like: ‘Man, that’s going to be tough to play on clay, coming in on everything.’”
The way most women on the WTA Tour return serve and attack from the baseline, coming to the net on every point would be a tough approach on any surface these days. It’s still a good way to pile up wins in junior tennis and in the lower tiers of the professional game, because it’s so unorthodox and surprising, like running a full-court press for the whole of a middle-school basketball game.
It’s a good way to freak out opponents, until the opponents are good enough to handle it.
Jenkins, intrigued, kept an eye on Urhobo whenever he saw her on the draw sheet for tournaments. Occasionally he would talk with her father and coach, TJ, letting him know that Jenkins — and the USTA — was available if he ever wanted Urhobo to come to the national training center in Orlando, Fla.
Eleven months ago, Jenkins was on the road with some of the 14-and-under prospects for the USTA when his phone rang. Kathy Rinaldi, the head of women’s tennis at the organization who stepped down earlier this month after 16 years, said she had a great project for him. It was Urhobo.
“We started last June,” Jenkins said. “It’s been quite the journey.”
Has it ever. Urhobo finished last year as the world No. 432. She has climbed nearly 250 spots since then. For five weeks between the end of March and the start of May, she won more rankings points on clay than any other U.S. player outside the top 100. That made her the winner of the organization’s “wild card challenge” for the French Open, and she will play her first Grand Slam main-draw match against Katie Boulter of Great Britain.
Urhobo, 19, is 29-7 this year. She qualified for the main draw at the WTA 500 Charleston Open in March, and was up 7-5, 3-0 on Solana Sierra of Argentina, who took Coco Gauff to three sets at the Italian Open, when Sierra retired due to injury. Urhobo lost in the next round. She still came away thinking that she wasn’t far away from the competition.
“They’re just like me,” she said during a recent interview. “They’re just playing at this higher level, and if I keep my head down and keep grinding, I can be there too.”
Grinding might not be an expected word from a player who was spotted for her quickness to the net and her surety when she got there. She stood out among the American players of her generation who came up at the same time — Iva Jović, Clervie Ngounoe — who played more traditionally. Jović is now a top-20 player, with a level of controlled baseline aggressiveness that anyone might covet.
Tennis players generally learn to compete from the baseline. Then they learn to move forward. In Urhobo, tennis has a potential answer to a fascinating question.
Can a top player learn how to play the sport backwards?
The jury will be out for a while. Jenkins and Urhobo are still very early in their process, and she’s still a teenager. Jenkins said they spent last summer getting to know each other and began reprogramming her tennis game in earnest in the fall.
“We kind of said, ‘Hey, look, we’ve got to build a solid foundation from the baseline so that we can enhance your net skills,’” he said.
“We’re obviously still in that process, even today, just giving her a stronger baseline game, more stability from the back so that she could come in and finish that net.”
Urhobo’s style goes back to her father, TJ, who was born in the U.S. to Nigerian parents and was a competitive player when he was younger. Akasha said her father grew up idolizing Pat Rafter and Pete Sampras, two hardcore serve-and-volleyers who had pretty good professional careers.
TJ put a racket in his daughter’s hands when she was two. Once she figured out how to put the strings on the ball, there was plenty of volleying, and then serving, and then serving and volleying together, from the beginning.
In 2019, Urhobo and her father went to the Miami Open. Urhobo watched Taylor Townsend, a magical volleyer who likes to come in whenever she can, play Simona Halep.
“That’s when I kind of started to understand how much he loved it and pretty much why,” she said.
After that, she was all in. At first, it worked pretty well, carrying Urhobo to the junior Grand Slam tournaments. But it was only going to work for so long. If players could use the tactic to win more matches than they lose in the modern era of the sport, far more of them would be doing it.
As she aged out of juniors and the competition grew stiffer, the time came to learn how to play tennis a little more like everyone else, so that she could use the game she loved to surprise them.
That was the seed of Rinaldi’s call to Jenkins.
Their reconstruction is about more than just learning how to hang out on the baseline. Jenkins said Urhobo has an amazing kick serve. She would hit it on her first serve, and on her second serve, because its arc gave her more time to get into the net.
“I kind of used the analogy of a baseball pitcher,” he said.
“You can’t only throw the curveball. You’ve got to use the changeup, use the fastball, use the slider, use the knuckle ball. And so we’ve been working a lot on just more variety in the serves.”
Month by month, Urhobo’s game has begun to gain structure and organization. She has learned the right places to stand when returning serve so that she can start a rally from deep, rather than simply trying to chip and charge.
“I’m definitely more patient than I used to be,” she said.
Before, she would come to the net and get passed 50 times in a match, sometimes on serve and sometimes on return. Still, she would keep coming. In their time together, Jenkins has seen her go from one extreme to the other. Now he sometimes has to tell her to follow one of her returns into the net at least once each set. If she resists, he tells her just to do it in the first game to get it over with. The goal is to make her an all-court player with the ability to finish at the net.
“She’s very raw, but just needs to clean things up here and there,” Jenkins said. “But, wow, the sky’s the limit for her.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women’s Tennis
2026 The Athletic Media Company
O que achou dessa notícia? Deixe um comentário abaixo e/ou compartilhe em suas redes sociais. Assim conseguiremos informar mais pessoas sobre o que acontece no mundo do tênis!
Esta notícia foi originalmente publicada em:
Fonte original