Coco Gauff is one athletic apple who didn’t fall so far from the tree. Her father, Corey Gauff, tried his hand at multiple sports in his formative years until he found a love for basketball, and he was a Georgia State Panther in his prime. Coco’s mother, Candi Gauff, was a gymnast-turned-track and field athlete back in the day. “Track and field was a second love,” Candi told The Sun Sentinel. “Gymnastics was [my] first. But what overshadows everything is the love of competing. So no matter what I was going to do, I was going to try and do my best in it, because I just like to compete.”
The decision to get Coco into tennis was a unanimous one. Her father, Corey, became her leading coach. Coco was trained by other coaches along the way, including Gerard Loglo, with whom she began working when she was 8 years old. The Gauffs, however, were not in a hurry to get Coco playing professionally. Instead, they focused on nurturing her passion for tennis.
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“The next few years we’re just going to manage the process and the development process for her to mentally grow, and keep her in love with the sport because she loves playing,” Corey shared in a conversation with Black Tennis Magazine in 2017.
