MELBOURNE, Australia — There’s a young woman who looks a lot like Coco Gauff at Melbourne Park for the Australian Open. She has the same fiery, competitive eyes, the same tendency to break out in a giggle in the middle of a sentence and the same number of titles.

Her tennis, though, is different. This Gauff has become the sporting version of an iPhone, with a new model coming out just about every year or so.

The prototype was all athleticism and attack. Then the forehand turned wobbly and Gauff 2.0, the winning-ugly version guided by Brad Gilbert, came out in summer 2023.

Putting high, heavy topspin on her forehand to protect its essential weakness and chasing down balls in every corner of the court to defend all day and night: that version won the 2023 U.S. Open, her only Grand Slam title.

Then, the winning-ugly model stopped winning and the losses were ugly. Gauff fell behind then world No. 1 Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina, exiting Wimbledon and losing her U.S. Open title at the hands of Emma Navarro, who hit one more ball than even Gauff could manage.

Out went Gilbert, and in came the development of Gauff 3.0, focused on fixing the serve and forehand.

She and her team figured it would be a three- or four-month project. Gauff, who made the U.S. Open girls final at 13 and won her first match on Centre Court against Venus Williams at 15, has a habit of arriving ahead of schedule. She started to see results from her latest reboot in three or four weeks and it’s been mostly ever-upward since.

Gauff is 18-2 since her exit from the U.S. Open. She has beaten her nemesis, Swiatek, twice, and Sabalenka once. She won the WTA 1000 tournament in Beijing and then the WTA Tour Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia too, which brought a $5.5million (£4.5m) payday, the richest-ever in women’s tennis. Then she led the U.S. to the title at the United Cup in Australia, which included one of those wins over Swiatek.

Gauff 3.0, who kicks off her Australian Open on Monday afternoon against fellow American Sofia Kenin, has been the version of Gauff that much of the competition always feared would come along some day.

The version that would arise from working out the kinks in that shaky serve and unstable forehand, the two most important shots in tennis.

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To do it, Gauff turned to two coaches, one new and one who has been with her through all her evolutions. Jean-Christophe Faurel has worked with her on and off since her early teens, but it’s Matt Daly, a former D1 player in the NCAAs for University of Notre Dame, Ind., who has been transformative in her new game.

Daly came aboard weeks after Gauff double-faulted 19 times in her three-set loss to Navarro at the U.S. Open. In her news conference, she said that she never wanted to lose another match like that again. Win or lose, she didn’t want to play ugly anymore. Daly arrived to help guide some of the heavy reconstructive work that Gauff and her father, Corey, her first coach, and still a major presence, had come to believe was essential.

His diagnosis was that Gauff’s grip made her whip the face of her racket through her service motion too quickly. She didn’t enough time to make true contact with the ball.

In general, most players use a continental grip to serve, as though they are shaking hands. Some players rotate their hand a little further — for Gauff, a right-handed player, a little further to the left — turning it closer to an eastern backhand grip.

That makes adding topspin to the serve easier, so it’s often deployed on second serves to help them kick up and out of the service box. In Gauff’s case, she was too often spooning second serves into the bottom of the net. Daly had her draw a mark on her grip that told her exactly where to position her hand before each serve, rotating it back closer to the continental. The mark remains.

Turning the wrist a matter of millimeters might sound like a minor tweak. It’s not. As Sabalenka found out in 2022, razing a service motion built up through a lifetime of repetitions is one of the most vulnerable things a tennis player can do.

Initially, Gauff’s forehand looked to need a grip adjustment, too. Like Swiatek, she basically grips her racket from underneath the handle — a heavy western grip. Changing a forehand grip means changing the timing, the arc of the swing, and everything else about the stroke. Experts told Corey Gauff that might be a nine-month project.

Daly and Faurel didn’t believe that was necessary. The problem wasn’t her grip. It was her tendency to rely on her legs to grind and defend and hit with her weight going backward, which led her to swing up too much on the ball rather than through it, shanking it all over. If she did less of that and played more aggressively, prioritizing offense and attacking more, she wouldn’t hit so many forehands from difficult positions.

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Now, instead of using her legs to defend, Gauff is using them to get her in position to take the ball early more often with a an aggressive, open-stance forehand.

Coco Gauff working her forehand ahead of the Australian Open. (Graham Denholm / Getty Images)

In her pre-tournament press conference in Melbourne on Friday, Gauff said that none of this was comfortable at first. She had to convince herself to be comfortable with the discomfort and awkwardness of holding the racket differently and attacking. The payoffs would come eventually.

“Even if it’s uncomfortable, trying to focus on that long-term path, making sure that I’m making adjustments that I need to hopefully have a good career long-term,” she said.

As she saw it, she didn’t have much choice. The best players are playing more aggressively every year. Defending the court was becoming a harder, less viable option.

“I know there’s going to be some tough moments in this tournament,” she said. “Hopefully I can get through them.”

Kenin, the 2020 Australian Open champion, could cause Gauff some problems. She beat Gauff in the first round of Wimbledon in 2023. That loss led her team to hire Gilbert for the start of the last Coco reboot.

In Melbourne, Gauff said that changing her game technically has also had an impact on her mentality. In New York, when her title defense hung heavy over the tournament, she started reminding herself that she had already won one, and she would have plenty of chances to win another.

“As athletes, we get caught up and losing feels like the end of the world, and winning feels like something we should do, not something we should be grateful for. No one makes us feel like that except ourselves. I think I just realized it’s never that important.”

Gauff played her last match of the 2024 season on November 9. She skipped the Billie Jean King Cup, went home to Florida and put her rackets away for the next two weeks. She dialed way back on any daily fitness. She had zero obligations to her sponsors, No fashion photo shoots. She went to California with her friends for a music festival. She didn’t play a competitive match again until just before New Year’s. It was the longest off-season she can remember having.

Through the fall, in the midst of the rebuild when the results didn’t matter to her, she tried not to let her mind go to that place. It didn’t always work, but now she feels she is playing some of the best tennis of her life. Now the test is whether the serenity can last, for a player who has become a victim of her frustration in the past.

“Stay in the moment and enjoy it as much as possible,” she said.

“That’s what I’ve been doing the last few tournaments. The results have obviously been good because of that. But just trying to learn to do that even when the results aren’t so good.”

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)