Believing, for Hailey Baptiste, may start coming as easily as breathing

“Breath and believe, breathe and believe.”

That was the advice Franklin Tiafoe gave Hailey Baptiste as she stepped up to serve late in the second set against Mirra Andreeva on Thursday in Madrid.

As far as coaching mantras go, the phrase has a lot to recommend it. Catchy and succinct, it stays in the mind, but doesn’t burden it with any extraneous detail. Most important, it seems to be working for Baptiste. With Tiafoe and her primary coach, Will Woodall, behind her, the 24-year-old Washington, D.C., native just had the best week of her career. She reached her first WTA 1000 semifinal, and saved six match points to beat Aryna Sabalenka for her first win over a world No. 1.

It’s the kind of performance we would normally call a breakthrough. Except that Baptiste’s entire career feels like one long, slow-rolling breakthrough. Since 2022, she has finished 166th in the rankings, then 131st, then 92nd, then 61st at the end of 2025. Since January, she has nearly cut that in half, to No. 32. In a few more months, she might halve it again.

“Slow and steady wins the race” might be Baptiste’s motto. It’s also a fair description of how she makes her way around a tennis court. She never looks rushed, doesn’t waste energy, and sets ups points thoughtfully. She can fire her ground strokes as hard as anyone, but she likes to construct her rallies—with a kick serve or a slice backhand—before she pulls the trigger.

“I just like to be creative on court,” Baptiste says. “I grew up playing with boys pretty much my whole youth. My coaches kind of coached me to play a little bit more like a guy.”

“Obviously it helps me, I think. Girls don’t love the kick serve and the slice.”

Baptiste’s father, Quasim, a native of Haiti, introduced her to tennis, but when she wouldn’t stop begging him to go back to the courts, he finally sent her to a camp.

“He couldn’t keep doing it,” Baptiste told Ayan Broomfield with a laugh in a recent Tennis Channel interview. “He didn’t love it as much as I did.”

Baptiste credits both of her parents for their early support, as well as the USTA. At 9, she started at the JTCC in College Park, MD, then moved to the national training center in Orlando when she was 15.

“The USTA had a huge, huge impact on me,” she said. “Without them, I wouldn’t be where I am.”

One USTA coach in particular, former pro Jamea Jackson, take a close interest in Baptiste’s game.

“She got my head screwed on straight, explaining what it’s like to be a professional. She started transitioning me into that mindset.”

Once Baptiste was on tour, though, she was on her own much of the time. She spent months without a coach, flying solo from tournament to tournament.

“Lose a match, didn’t really have anyone to talk to afterwards,” Baptiste said of those days. “Had to do the whole [post-match] debrief process by myself. You just learn things about yourself and about the game. I think it gave me confidence.”

That life might be enough to break most players. She says it “gave me a new love of the game.”

I decided to stop fighting myself. Hailey Baptiste

With that love has come—again, slowly and steadily—a new confidence. You could almost see Baptiste’s belief in her game, and the places it can take her, grow from month to month over the past two years. In Madrid, it finally bloomed in full. She beat eighth-ranked Jasmine Paolini, 11th ranked Belinda Bencic, and then pulled off one of the upsets of the year over Sabalenka.

For Baptiste, saving those match points was a validation of her talent, but also of a commitment she made about how she would deal with adversity on court.

“I decided to stop fighting myself,” Baptiste said. “I want to say, ‘Oh, it’s so hard, you don’t understand what I’m feeling.’ But at the end of the day, it’s just a decision.”

“Either you get over it, or you sit in that feeling, and sitting in that feeling has gotten me nowhere.”

Baptiste looked ready to make another comeback against Andreeva in the semifinals. This time she saved a match point, came back 3-5 down in the second set, and had three set points of her own in the tiebreaker. But another miracle wasn’t to be, as Andreeva steadied herself, saved one set point with a topspin lob and another with an ace, and closed it out on her third match point.

Again, Baptiste proved that she could hang with another Top 10 player. But there also error-filled patches, and on one of her set points in the tiebreaker, she didn’t appear to accelerate quickly enough to a ball that she might have been able to put away.

Still, this was a week that should put Baptiste in the U.S. contender conversation, not too far behind fellow Americans of her generation like Coco Gauff and Amanda Anisimova.

Believing, for Baptiste, may start coming as easily as breathing.