What do Coco Gauff and Amanda Anisimova need to do to stay the U.S. top two in 2026?

The final weekend of the 2017 US Open was a heady one for women’s tennis in the States. Four Americans—Venus Williams, Sloane Stephens, Madison Keys, and Coco Vandeweghe—monopolized the semifinals, and the subsequent final between Stephens and Keys seemed to signal the rise of a new generation of Slam contenders ready to grab the baton from the Williams sisters.

But for those in the know, there was something even more tantalizing happening on the side courts. That weekend, an even newer generation, and a more distant future, were taking shape in New York. As Stephens was beating Keys in Ashe Stadium, two teenagers from Florida, Amanda Anisimova and Coco Gauff, were dueling for the girls’ title in the Grandstand.

Score-wise, it wasn’t much of a duel. Anisimova, who had just turned 16, beat a 13-year-old Gauff 6-0, 6-2. Still, each had time to show off the strengths that would take them into the Top 5 as pros. Anisimova controlled the vast majority of the match with her strong serve and stronger ground strokes. Gauff, meanwhile, gave us an early idea of her stubborn fighting spirit when she saved nine match points in a 28-point final game.

Fast forward eight years, and the distant future promised that day has begun to appear.

For Gauff, the future wasn’t all that distant. Just four years later, she was in the Roland Garros women’s final, and two years after that, she won the grown-up US Open. In 2025, she added her second Slam at Roland Garros, and has made herself a fixture in the Top 3.

For Anisimova, the road from junior to pro glory was much more roundabout. In 2019, at 17, she made a Roland Garros semifinal. But by 2023, she was so disenchanted with her career that she left the tour for seven months. Finally, in 2025, everything came together as she reached her first two major finals and won her first two WTA 1000 titles. As 2026 begins, Anisimova is ranked No. 4 in the world, one spot behind Gauff.

There are two other Americans in the Top 10, No. 6 Jessica Pegula and No. 7 Madison Keys. But at 31 and 30, respectively, their careers are farther along. Anisimova, 24, and Gauff, still just 21, should be with us for a while.

Americans have never been known to have low expectations for their tennis players, especially on the WTA side. This is the country of Serena Williams, Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, and dozens of others major champions and former No. 1s. That said, Gauff has already proven she’s capable of winning Slam titles on different surfaces, and after last year we know Anisimova has the game to do the same.

What should our expectations be for them in the new season?

“It feels more like I believe in myself”

Anisimova’s challenge is virtually all mental. Physically and technically, she can hit with any opponent, and out-hit most of them. She’s not the athlete Aryna Sabalenka is, and at 5’11” she’ll never be as speedy as Iga Swiatek. But Anisimova’s strokes are purer and her shots more penetrating than theirs are. Her backhand is so good that Pegula and her fellow podcasters on the Player’s Box waxed lyrically—and fearfully—about it for 10 minutes last fall.

The issue for the New Jersey native has always been self-belief. When she plays, you can almost see her asking herself: Can I hold this lead? Do I belong on this stage, with this opponent? That finally began to change as she made her way through the draw at Wimbledon last year. Yet even then, belief didn’t come easily. It required constant reinforcement.

“I feel like when I was at Wimbledon, every single match was kind of like a surprise to me. I was shocked with every match that I won,” Anisimova said in New York. “But here it feels more like I believe in myself, and I’m able to do it, kind of. So I think that’s been the shift for me, at least here at the US Open.”

🖥️📲 Stream Anisimova's best matches of 2025 on the Tennis Channel App!

Notice the “kind of” that she sneaks in there. Supreme self-confidence may never come naturally to Anisimova on a tennis court.

So maybe it makes sense that the most important moment of her season may have been her worst defeat. Losing 6-0, 6-0 to Swiatek in the Wimbledon final, with the world watching, could have been a crushing blow. Natasha Zvereva lost by the same scores to Steffi Graf in the 1988 Roland Garros final at 17 and never made it that far at a major again.

Instead, it gave Anisimova something to prove—she knew she was better than what she showed, and she needed people to see it. She went on to beat Swiatek at the US Open and again in the WTA Finals. In between, Anisimova won the biggest title of her career at the WTA 1000 in Beijing, a run that included a 6-1, 6-2 rout of Gauff in the semifinals.

It’s one thing to believe that you can win big titles. It’s another to believe that you should win them—that’s how the greats feel. Can Anisimova start to feel that way at this stage in her career? Confidence is never permanent, even for best players, and it won’t be for her. But she’ll be starting on a surface she likes, in Australia, where she has reached the fourth round three times. Maybe more important, she knows that her mind, like any of her strokes, will only get stronger if she works at it.

“The mental game is so important for an athlete,” Anisimova said near the end of 2025. “I’m still constantly learning and trying to get better in that department. I think there’s always room for improvement.”

“I’ve learned to just remember to stay on my path”

The places where Gauff needs to improve in 2026 are more obvious. As always with her, the serve, and to a slightly lesser extent the forehand, lead the way. So much so that Gauff, right before the biggest event of the year, the US Open, fired one of her coaches and brought in serve specialist Gavin MacMillan to replace him.

The early results were excellent: She went 13-4 after the MacMillan hiring, winning a 1000-level title in Wuhan and making the semifinal of another in Beijing.

Problem solved? Probably not. Gauff did pretty much the same thing in 2024: She hired a new coach after a disappointing Open, then tore through the fall events in China and closed with her first WTA Finals title in Riyadh. Gauff says she treats those late-season events essentially as “practice,” which helps her stay more relaxed.

Can she carry that attitude, and that success, over when the Slam season starts again in January? Working with a serve coach and fixing technical flaws will help. A few years ago, MacMillan had a hand in curing Sabalenka of her own career-threatening bout with the service yips.

But like anything else in tennis, there’s a mental aspect to a service issue. Gauff herself rarely double faults in doubles, the way she does in singles, which indicates that her problem isn’t purely technical. So it may be a while before we know for sure whether she has made lasting progress on her serve in 2026. That said, the fact that Sabalenka has stayed cured of the yips should give Gauff hope.

🖥️📲 Stream Gauff's best matches of 2025 on the Tennis Channel App!

If Coco’s serve is her weakness, her biggest strength continues to be her mentality—the same way it was when she saved nine match points against Anisimova as a 13-year-old. At 21, though, her mentality goes beyond just grittiness on-court. These days, after six years on tour, Gauff has a healthy idea of what she’s capable of, and what is asking too much. In recent years, she has cycled through a long series of hot streaks and cold streaks; she’ll be unbeatable for two months, and then struggle to win a match for the next two. By now, she has stopped blaming herself for the rough patches. In a calendar that goes non-stop for 10 months, they come with the territory.

“I think sometimes tennis fans want us to win, like every week, but we’re playing 11 months. It’s not that easy,” Gauff told Tennis Channel this past summer. “It’s completely normal, I think, for maybe a player to have a good three, four weeks, and then maybe not have as well of a good three or three four weeks, just because the way our season is built.

“I’ve been learning and have learned to just remember to stay on my path. The only expectations I have are the ones that I have of myself.”

Wise words—and hopefully ones that Anisimova will heed as well. The top two Americans are stylistic opposites—Gauff’s a defender, Anisimova is an attacker—but there’s room for both at the top. Let’s see if the future they once promised arrives for good in 2026.