Wim Fissette, Iga Świątek and why coaching a generational talent is a challenge

After all these years spent coaching some of the best players to lift a tennis racket, Wim Fissette knows and accepts the rules of the game.

When results don’t match a player’s expectations, the player can’t fire herself. If other members of the team — a trainer, a sports psychologist, a physiotherapist — have been around longer and have a deeper relationship with her, then the axe falls on the coach.

That’s one of the reasons Fissette, one of the most respected and successful coaches on the WTA Tour, was not surprised late last month when he learned that Iga Świątek, the reigning Wimbledon champion and a six-time Grand Slam winner, no longer required his services.

“There are some teams that can stay really calm under, let’s say, difficult conditions. Others feel like something needs to change.” Fissette said during an interview this week.

“As in every sport, it’s always first the coach that has to go. At the highest level in sports, this is part of the job. You have to accept that.”

Still, these moments are never easy. Fissette not only helped Świątek win her first Wimbledon title. Together, they started a tennis journey that Świątek wants to continue after Fissette has gone, using the foundations of her tennis past to construct her tennis future.

“I want to be a wall on the court,” she said during an interview with Sport.pl this week, ahead of hiring Francisco Roig to replace Fissette. Roig is best known for his 18 years with Świątek’s idol, Rafael Nadal, who this week dropped by his academy in Manacor, Mallorca, to give her some pointers on her forehand.

Świątek and Fissette have built most of that wall. But the job is not finished.

Fissette said that from the moment he joined team Świątek in the fall of 2024, he knew that coaching her would be one of the most challenging tasks of his career — because she is a generational talent.

Świątek, 24, is a sublime player. When Fissette started working with her, she had five Grand Slam titles, the longest women’s win-streak this century (37) and 125 weeks as world No. 1 in the bank. For Świątek, world No. 2 in late 2024, anything less than winning more Grand Slam titles and a tilt for world No. 1 would be considered a failure.

“They were almost unbeatable for a few years,” Fissette said. “The expectations are going to be super high. Every loss will hurt extra. I was aware of the difficulties in this project. It was impossible to do better. But I was still really happy that I took the challenge, and happy with what we achieved. Iga is such an extraordinary player and athlete.”

Fissette was also the only member of her team not from Poland. He had to coach Świątek in English, a second language for both of them, if not a third.

The language barrier became something of a metaphor. On a tight-knit, mostly Polish performance team that includes Świątek’s psychologist and near-constant travel companion, Daria Abramowicz, and her physiotherapist Maciej Ryszczuk, Fissette arrived as a natural outsider.

“Every word I say is new to her,” he said. “Out of respect for Iga, I don’t want to go deep into that.”

In a social media post announcing Fissette’s dismissal, Świątek wrote: “After many months of working together with my coach I’ve decided to take a different path.

“It was an intense time full of challenges and many important experiences. I’m grateful for his support, experience, and everything we achieved together — including one of my biggest dreams in sport.

“Wim, thank you for this time and for the lessons I’ve learned thanks to you. I wish you all the best — both professionally and personally.”

In the interview with Sport.pl, Świątek said she “didn’t feel fully secure in my game lately, and wasn’t at my best in terms of confidence, which was also visible on court.

“I am now focusing on getting back to the skills I have always had and that helped me most in difficult moments, because those situations are inevitably part of competing. At the same time, regarding parting ways with Wim, this is not the kind of decision someone like me makes based on a single loss. I would never act hastily. While I may sometimes come across as emotional, in reality I approach decisions in a very rational and considered way, always taking the time to reflect rather than acting impulsively.”

During the first months of their partnership at the end of 2024, Fissette said, they found ways to negotiate the communication blocks. Świątek knew she needed new solutions, and that their results would take time to bear fruit.

She showed up at last year’s Australian Open playing differently than she had during most of the previous three seasons with Tomasz Wiktorowski. Wiktorowski had preached a direct, simple, first-strike style, which smoothed out some of the contours of her game that made her such an electrifying talent in her younger years.

It worked until it became too easy to figure out. Tension, opponents, or both would put Świątek into uncomfortable positions. As things got tighter, she would hit harder, and one or two errors would turn into 10 or 12.

Fissette wanted her to play with more patience, to put more shape and spin on the ball, to aim at bigger targets rather than at the lines, and to play with more variety. No one in the women’s game can match the jumping, revving forehand or the arcing backhand that she possesses on her best days, so why not use them to construct points, rather than trying to end them by playing flat?

The strategy helped her come within a point of the 2025 Australian Open final, but she lost to Madison Keys, the eventual champion, in a match tiebreak. “I see my game every day,” Świątek said during an interview after that tournament.

“It’s hard to see the changes because they’re little. I know. They only seem big on a bigger horizon.”

Fissette and Świątek left Australia filled with optimism. But then Świątek went to the Qatar Open and the BNP Paribas Open, tournaments she had dominated, and did not lift their trophies. After losses at those events, Fissette noticed a familiar dynamic among great players. When a change in approach makes results worse, they tend to fall back on what made them great in the first place. They have to learn the hard way that it won’t work anymore. And Świątek was not just changing her approach through new ideas, but trying to resurrect old parts of her tennis identity at the same time.

“If you look at the best players in the world in the past 20 years, it’s, ‘How can I learn to improve and to develop?’” Fissette said, noting the way Roger Federer, Nadal and Novak Djokovic never stopped evolving.

“Especially after losses, it was difficult to look at the development instead of like, OK, ‘Let’s just keep trying to do what was working.’”

Initially, that dynamic helped Fissette’s cause. Świątek’s return to overhitting led her to something like rock bottom. Coco Gauff thrashed her in the Madrid Open semifinals and Danielle Collins rolled her in the third round of the Italian Open. Crushing experiences on her favorite surface, clay, led her to adopt tactical changes. She may have lost to Aryna Sabalenka in the French Open semifinals, but she did so playing the tennis she wanted to play. It was growth.

By the middle of July, Świątek was a champion at Wimbledon, the tournament where nearly all tennis greats rise, and where she never thought she would win. The technical changes Fissette asked for on her serve, her patience for manipulating points and slow unearthing of her old feel and touch coalesced into a dominant title run.

But despite two more titles that summer and early fall, at the Cincinnati and Korean Opens, Świątek again found herself caught in a tennis quandary through the end of last year and the start of this one. She and Fissette’s vision for her tennis was taking hold, but she could not get out of the way of her serve, which did not bring the easy points and releases of pressure that it did on quicker courts.

Her first-serve-in percentages got too low. She started playing basically every point from neutral, tiring her legs and heaping pressure on her baseline game. It took just a few points on either side to turn a close set into a one-sided disaster. And worst of all, she could see the problems, but not fix them.

“I kind of knew what I’m doing wrong. I was stuck in doing it wrong rather than actually solving it,” she said after a China Open loss to Emma Navarro that ended with a 6-0 reverse.

Once again, she was caught between two styles. During matches, she seemed far more engaged with Abramowicz, in Polish, than with Fissette, who increasingly found it difficult to get through to her. At this year’s BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells and Miami Open, Świątek and Abramowicz appeared to be yelling at one another during matches.

Fissette said he understood.

“She has been working with the same people for a lot of years, and she’s been super successful for years,” he said. “It’s normal that in, let’s say, challenging times, that she kind of goes back to these people or maybe wants more from these people.”

Following the loss that spelled the end of her partnership with Fissette, to compatriot Magda Linette in Miami, Świątek said that tennis had become “complicated” and she felt “chaos” in her mind.

In her announcement that she was parting ways with Fissette, she said the rest of her performance team would remain in place.

During an interview at the U.S. Open last September, when the tennis future they were building together was brighter than it looked at its end, Fissette said something about Świątek’s decision to embrace change that resonates as much now as it did then.

“Sometimes it just takes a hard time,” Fissette said. “It takes something that happens to make you do it.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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