Sport
The basketball dad who taught himself tennis to coach his daughter
He had never played the game. He studied the careers of the greats, moved the family to Florida, and coached his daughter from six years old to the top of world tennis.
You better understand the process, and so you don’t get too jittery about it.
Corey Gauff
Corey Gauff’s sport was basketball. When it became clear that his daughter Coco, then six, had something unusual in her hands, the obvious move was to find her a tennis coach. He appointed himself instead.
That decision is easy to admire in hindsight and was ridiculous at the time. He had no playing background in the game he was about to teach at an elite level. So he studied it the way you would study for a qualification, and in particular he studied how other families had done it, reading the careers of Venus and Serena Williams and the fathers and coaches around them for what worked and what went wrong.
The family also moved, from Atlanta to Delray Beach in Florida, because that is where the tennis was. Uprooting a household for a child’s long-shot talent is the kind of bet that only looks sensible if it comes off, and plenty of families make it and it does not.
What is more interesting than the winning is the handing over. As Coco’s career grew, other coaches came in, and in 2023 Corey stepped back from coaching full time. Plenty of parents in his position cannot do that, and the sport is littered with the wreckage of the ones who would not. He now functions, in his daughter’s words, as a dad who happens to send a scouting report before every match.
He is also clear-eyed about what a parent actually brings. “I think it helps parents when they have played as high as college or even pro,” he has said. “You better understand the process, and so you don’t get too jittery about it.” That is not a coaching insight. It is a parenting one: your job on the sideline is mostly to be the calm in the room.
We celebrate Corey Gauff because he learned a whole sport to give his daughter a start, then had the sense to know when to stop being her coach and go back to being her dad.
Who is Corey Gauff?
Corey Gauff is one of the girl dads celebrated on girl.dad, based in Delray Beach, Florida. The short version: He learned an entire sport from scratch rather than hand his daughter’s talent to someone else.
What kind of story is this?
girl.dad files it under Sport, published 24 August 2026.
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