Maria Sakkari reveals Angelique Kerber warning, Caroline Garcia 'reaching her potential' - WTA Finals Diary
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Updated 07/11/2022 at 09:06 GMT
Reem Abulleil reports from the WTA Finals as Maria Sakkari reveals a warning from Angelique Kerber and Chris Evert says Caroline Garcia is reaching her potential after making the final of the touranment. Garcia beat Sakkari to set up a meeting with Aryna Sabalenka, who stunned world No. 1 Iga Swiatek in three sets. Eva Scheumann also discusses the work of the Performance Health team.
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‘Kerber warned me this season would be tough’
Maria Sakkari is ready to turn the engines off for a while now that her 2022 campaign has come to an end at the hands of Caroline Garcia in the WTA Finals semis in Fort Worth on Sunday.
The Greek star endured what has been her toughest season to date but will still finish 2022 with the joint-highest year-end ranking of her career at No. 6 in the world.
Sakkari cracked the top 10 for the first time last year and concluded 2021 ranked No. 6. The 27-year-old hit a career-high No. 3 in March 2022 and struggled to handle the pressure that came with her new status at the top of the women’s game.
She managed to salvage her season by marching to the Guadalajara final a couple of weeks ago, securing her place in the WTA Finals, where she went 3-0 in the group stage before falling to Garcia in the semis.
She is proud of how she rallied at the end of the season and revealed that former world No. 1 Angelique Kerber warned her team last January that following up a breakthrough campaign like the one Sakkari had in 2021 would be a tough task.
“I think when you first break into the top 10 and you first finish your season ended top 10, I think the next season is the toughest one,” said Sakkari.
“Kerber went up to Tom [Hill, my coach] because we practiced at the Australian Open, and she was like, ‘Good luck this season. It's gonna be the toughest one’, but in a good way.
“So we had a warning. Obviously I didn't know it was going to be that tough. But again, there are so many things that went wrong this year, but at the same time I managed to get myself in the right direction. And I'm proud that I could finish the year in the top 10 and being one of the best players. We'll see tonight maybe the top five of the tour.”
Chrissie is a Caro fan
Former world No. 1 and 18-time major champion Chris Evert is in Fort Worth this week as an ambassador for the tournament and she sat down with the media to discuss the WTA Finals field.
The American legend is a big fan of Caroline Garcia’s game, and she has loved watching her recapture her form this season.
“I’m very impressed with her this year. It’s been really nice to see because she’s had a tough go and I think personally, and in her tennis game, she’s never really reached her potential because she’s had a lot of obstacles,” said Evert of Garcia.
“This year, I see a smile on her face and I see her just crunching the ball, stepping inside the baseline and just going after her shots with freedom, consistency, and she’s serving great. I think finally she’s coming into her own and is reaching her potential – the potential we saw five, six, seven years ago but it never came to fruition. I love watching her. They’re very organised strokes, she has great timing. I like her game a lot.”
Spotlight on WTA physios
There is so much that goes into organising a WTA tournament with countless people we know little about working behind the scenes at each and every event.
An integral part of any tournament on tour is the Performance Health team, which includes primary healthcare providers, physical therapists, massage therapists, and mental health and well-being professionals.
Eva Scheumann, vice president of Performance Health, Tournament Services, has worked with the WTA for the past 16 years and is here in Fort Worth, where players are trying to finish the season in one piece, while competing for one of the biggest trophies in the sport.
“Our emphasis is prevention and education. And therefore we’re working with the players on their nutrition and biomechanics, we’re looking at their equipment and apparel, we’re working together with mental health and wellness, sports dieticians. We’re working more globally with the athletes, it’s not only we’re treating injuries, but we’re more preventing the players to get injured. So that’s kind of our philosophy,” Scheumann told Eurosport at Dickies Arena in Fort Worth.
While some players travel with their own physiotherapists, Scheumann says her team works with every player on tour, even during the offseason.
“We are really the experts in the sport. We travel all year round with the players, guiding them and helping them on the court, off the court, at tournaments and out of tournaments, when they’re in the rehabilitation phase or when they are in the offseason, we’re working with them on their preseason training.
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Eva Scheumann attends to Elise Mertens
Image credit: Getty Images
“A lot of the offseason work is done remotely via telehealth [online services]. But if a player wishes, we are also coming to certain areas or we would advise some of our staff members to see players in that area.
“We can also guide them with physical therapists or massage therapists that we have worked with in the past or that we know in that area that they can get appointments with.”
Scheumann has real passion for what she does and describes it as “the best job ever”. Part of that job requires a primary healthcare provider to step on court during matches if a player needs to assess an injury or get treatment for a physical issue. A decision on whether a player is fit enough to continue playing is often made in a short amount of time, which could be stressful.
“We get trained in that. So it is a short time frame to make a quick decision but most of our athletes they’re very fit and healthy. Injuries happen in professional sport and if it’s an injury where we really think the advice is not to continue, they will not continue,” she explains.
“It can be sometimes very stressful because you only have a short period of time and you’re on a big court, but we know the players also so well that we know what’s going on with them. It’s unlikely that something happens and the evaluation takes a little bit longer to make the decision, is it treatable and you need a medical timeout, or does the player need to retire, worse case?”
The number of people from Scheumann’s team present at a tournament depends on the size of the draw. For a 32-player field, typically two primary healthcare providers and one massage therapist are on site. At the bigger tournaments, between seven to nine physiotherapists and five to seven massage therapists are available. On average, a full-time primary healthcare provider would travel to 10 to 12 tournaments per year.
“We are working a lot with players on prevention and that includes pre-match. So we would do warm-up massages, we’re doing warm-up treatments sometimes, or physical warm-ups, where we go with them into the gym to do a sports-specific warm-up.
“And after the match we’re helping them in their recovery as well. We are building recovery centres on each site, where the players can get their best recovery. They get muscle recovery, nutritional recovery, so that would include massage therapy, maybe treatment, some maintenance. If something happened on court, we would evaluate and treat the injuries. We spend time with them before and after the match, or on non-match days we can do some rehab programs or some strengthening.”
Scheumann says the mental health and wellness area has seen lots of growth in recent years, and those specialists work with the rest of the team in the same training room. Psychotherapists are available on site for the players and also via telehealth year-round. So far, the mental health and wellness department has four providers but Scheumann expects that number to grow.
With the advancements made to equipment over the past two decades, force and power has increased in the game which means players must get fitter to keep up with the pace.
“I think we mainly see the dominant injuries that come from the serving. You’re loading your lower extremity and that’s mainly your thigh and that is on the landing leg,” she says when asked about some of the most common injuries sustained by players.
“That’s what we commonly see all the time. I wouldn’t say we didn’t see that in the past, I think that’s continuing to be something we need to work on.”
Stats of the day
- Aryna Sabalenka claimed a third career victory against a reigning world No.1 with a three-set triumph over Iga Swiatek on Sunday.
- Sabalenka snapped Swiatek’s 15-match winning streak against top-10 opposition.
- Having secured their place in the final in Fort Worth, Barbora Krejcikova and Katerina Siniakova have now won 27 of their 30 matches contested together in 2022.
- Garcia’s victory over Sakkari was the Frenchwoman’s career-best seventh top-10 win of the season.
- Garcia is the third Frenchwoman to reach the championship match at the WTA Finals and bidding to become the first French champion at the tournament since Amelie Mauresmo in 2005.
- Iga Swiatek will finish the 2022 season with 11,085 WTA ranking points. Since the WTA rankings were introduced, only Serena Williams recorded more points, most recently in June 2013 (13,615 points). It is the second most year-end ranking points earned, behind Williams’ 2013 total of 13,260.
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