“Now that I have a medal, I feel like I’ve made it. If I don’t win anything else, it’ll be fine,” she told me last summer. “But it definitely motivated me even more, not just the medal but the Wimbledon semifinals. Getting that close to a final showed me I can do it.”
The results, which earned her a return to the Top 20, were a culmination of two years under coach Pam Shriver. A Hall of Famer-turned-commentator, Shriver famously came on board in the middle of the 2022 San Diego Open; that same week, Vekic reached the final.
She added Sascha Bajin to the coaching team at the end of 2024, but both Bajin and Shriver were gone by the summer and Vekic, who has since dropped out of the Top 70, was without a coach coming into the final Grand Slam tournament of the season.
“I feel like I’ve been doing all the right things in training, but the results haven’t been what I expect or what I want,” she said after a physical victory over Jessica Bouzas Maneiro. “Staying motivated and pushing through has not been easy, but when you get a win like this or a win against Maria [Sakkari] last week in Monterrey, those were good matches.”
