For the third year in a row, Great Britain’s No.1 player Johanna Konta has decided to split with her coach, this time choosing to part ways with the well-respected American coach Michael Joyce, after a year of disappointment.
Konta had been making her way up the tennis ranking ladder in quite some style. Turning her game and her level of performances from a regular ITF player to gradually stepping into the Top 100, then the Top 50 before that memorable season in 2016 where she broke through to the Top 10. Johanna Konta really had arrived.
Konta’s team during that 2016 season was very much settled and stable. She was working with a long-time sports psychologist, Juan Coto, who really did make a huge difference outside of forehands and backhands.
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He enabled Konta to really alleviate all the tennis pressure on court and helped deal with the anxiety in the heat of the battle in top level tennis. Coto played a huge part in that success, but tragically passed away in November of the 2016 season, and Konta’s results never really recovered to those high standards thereafter.
At the end of that season, Konta split with coach Esteban Carril, before swiftly moving on to Grand Slam-winning coach Wim Fissette at the beginning of the 2017 season, but that was another coaching set up that would not stand the test of time, with Konta electing to part from his services at the end of the 2017 season.
Joyce was the next man for that role. A coach that Konta very much backed from the very beginning of the appointment till the end.
Konta’s issues really was the first half of the 2018 season.
She failed to defend her big Miami title of the previous year, falling to Venus Williams in the round of 16, and she was desperately chasing ranking points, which really put her in a disappointing situation coming into the grass court swing, which is the time of the year where Konta really wants to get the best out of her tennis and she simply wasn’t able to take the burden off her shoulders on the early hard court events in order to help her out during the grass.