At the Miami Open, it’s all about the tennis now for Frances Tiafoe and Hailey Baptiste

MIAMI — A good day for the Florida transplants. 

A really good day for a Washington, D.C.-area tennis center.

And an even better day for a couple of players who have learned the hard way that tennis careers usually resemble the zig-zag contours of a heart-rate monitor, rather than a smooth, rising arc.

Such is the fate of Frances Tiafoe and Hailey Baptiste, who grew up four years apart on the hard courts of the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Md. and make Florida their training base and second homes now. Baptiste, who now trains in Orlando, and Tiafoe, who lives in Boca Raton, have a bond that runs especially deep. Tiafoe has been a kind of big brother to her. His actual brother, Franklin, was Baptiste’s coach for a time last year.

They are always paying attention to what the other one is doing. Sometimes courtside — and even when they probably shouldn’t.

“I was looking at the scores when they would show up on the board during my match,” Baptiste, 24, said in her news conference after making her first WTA 1000 quarterfinal with a 6-3, 6-4 Miami Open win over Jelena Ostapenko, a former Grand Slam champion and one of the biggest hitters on the tour. 

Baptiste was trying to win four consecutive main-draw matches for the first time in her career, but she knew Tiafoe was in a tight one against the defending champion, Jakub Menšík, the big-serving 20-year-old Czech, who had climbed back from a one-set deficit to send their match into a deciding tiebreak. 

“I was literally getting nauseous because it was so close,” Baptiste said of watching the end of Tiafoe’s 7-6(4), 4-6, 7-6(11) dogfight in the locker room. 

Tiafoe had three match points from 6-3 in that tiebreak, and lost them all. On the third, a baby started wailing so loudly that their screams came over the thud-thud of the ball back and forth. Tiafoe then saved two match points, before winning the match on his seventh try, when Menšík sent one last ball off the court. 

Moments before, Tiafoe was bent over with exhaustion, trying to summon the energy to hit a serve after busting his lungs on a series of baseline battles in the tiebreak. Now he was screaming with joy. Menšík came over onto his side of the court and wrapped his arms around him. 

When he let go, Tiafoe dropped his racket, ripped off and tossed his shirt, and then his sweat bands and then his headbands. For a moment, it looked like he was going to keep going with the rest of his garments. 

He didn’t, but he knew this was one worth celebrating, given the journey he put himself on last year when, once again, he struggled with motivation and stopped his season a month early.

“I would have lost for sure six months ago, especially where I was at the end of last year,” he said in his news conference. This is big. It’s big for a lot of reasons.”

In tennis, so much depends on grinding out quality wins, on big stages like this one in Florida, and also the ones that aren’t so big. Bouncing back from losses when they come is not just a part of the sport. For all but a handful of players, it is their staple diet.

“If I’m not used to it now, then I probably wouldn’t be in the game for much longer,” Baptiste said. “It’s how the game has always been. From the beginning you lose almost every week.”

Like Tiafoe, Baptiste lost a lot less as a child than she does now. Only in the last year has she begun to figure out the right balance between solidity and aggression. There aren’t a lot of shots she doesn’t have. She can mix up spins and speeds better than most women on tour. 

It’s possible she’s one of those players who has long had too many tools at her disposal. Figuring out when to use the right one has been a puzzle. So has keeping her head on straight when matches go sideways.

Her latest coach, William Woodall, is another product of JTCC. He has helped with getting Baptiste not to destroy herself on the practice court every time they fill up a bucket of balls. She’s “training smarter,” she said. 

“We’ve known each other since we were young kids, maybe like 5 and 6 years old, so that brings a lot to his coaching game. He’s been able to work on my mindset a lot, which I think has made the biggest difference.”

That’s how it often is, for Tiafoe, too. At 28, after some come-to-Jesus talks with his inner circle, including his agents, parents and girlfriend in the fall, he has once again recommitted himself to the work of being a professional tennis player.

He set aside whether he liked it or not, because he knew no one really cared. Lots of people don’t feel like going to work every day, but they do it anyway. Getting fired up for the bright lights of the U.S. Open and lore of Wimbledon is the easy part. Being consistent, making the fourth round of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells and now Miami, which he had never done before, is in some ways the harder challenge. 

His reward is being a part of a lineup stacked with some of the best American tennis has to offer. He joined Taylor Fritz; Alex Michelsen, a three-set winner Monday over Alejando Tabilo; Tommy Paul, and Sebastian Korda, the slayer of world No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz, in the fourth round. Coco Gauff, a three-set winner over Sorana Cîrstea Monday, and the biggest American star of them all, will play in the quarterfinals against Belinda Bencic, who blitzed another American, Amanda Anisimova, late Monday night.

Next up for Tiafoe? Térence Atmane, a tricky left-hander from France with a whippy, fast serve that can be hard to time. 

“He’s good,” Tiafoe said. “He’s a dark-horse player. He beats a lot of guys out here.” 

Atmane, 24, is into the top 50 for the first time. It’s not a bright lights match. But it’s one Tiafoe now desperately wants and needs to get back to the neighborhood of the top 10, where he was not all that long ago. He, and Baptiste, too, think they now know what it will take to get there. 

“Doing the little things,” said Baptiste, who will face Aryna Sabalenka, the defending champion and world No. 1, on Wednesday.

“The annoying things, making sure that I do them every day, whether I want to or not.”

Sounds like someone she knows very well.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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