™Coco Gauff was fifteen when the tennis world first learned her name properly. At Wimbledon in 2019, the youngest player to qualify for the main draw beat Venus Williams — one of the sisters she had grown up watching — in the first round. She handled the moment the way she has handled most moments since: with a smile, a steady voice, and a game that looked far older than she was. Seven years on, she is a two-time Grand Slam champion, and the remarkable thing is how little the person at the center of it all seems to have changed.
A family decision
Gauff, whose full name is Cori Dionne Gauff, spent her first seven years in Atlanta. Her father, Corey, played college basketball at Georgia State; her mother, Candi, competed in track and field at Florida State and worked as an educator. She tried a range of sports as a child, but tennis took hold at six, inspired by Serena and Venus Williams and by a preference for competing on her own terms. At seven, the family moved back to her parents' hometown of Delray Beach, Florida, for better training opportunities — first living with her mother's parents, then in their own home.
It was a family project in the truest sense. Her parents stepped away from their careers to support her: Corey, who had little tennis experience himself, became her primary coach, while Candi oversaw her homeschooling. She has two younger brothers, Codey and Cameron, and the household that raised her was built around schoolwork, practice and each other, rather than around fame. The fame arrived anyway.
Growing up in public
The Wimbledon breakthrough was only the beginning. Gauff won her first Grand Slam singles title at the US Open in 2023, aged nineteen, beating Aryna Sabalenka in the final, and added a second at the French Open in 2025, again beating Sabalenka. She has also won the WTA Finals and a French Open doubles title, and this year reached the semifinals at both Wimbledon and the US Open, winning in Cincinnati along the way. She did much of it while still learning, in public, how to carry expectation — the weight of being a home favorite, a former champion, and a teenager turned adult under the lights.
What has stayed constant is her composure. She talks about her faith, about family, and about the work still to be done, without dressing any of it up. The tennis, for all its power and athleticism, has never quite outrun the personality: competitive, curious, and unusually clear-eyed about where she stands.
Using her voice
Off court, Gauff has never waited to be told she is old enough to speak. In June 2020, aged sixteen, she stood up at a peaceful protest in Delray Beach following the murder of George Floyd and spoke, unplanned and unscripted, about love, action and using your voice — noting that her grandmother, Yvonne Lee Odom, had helped integrate Delray Beach's public schools decades earlier. She told the crowd she was too young to vote, and asked those who could to vote for her future, and her brothers' future, too.
That instinct has carried into the rest of her public life: a signature shoe line with New Balance, including the Coco Delray, named for the town where she grew up training on the public courts at Pompey Park; a love of music, reading and fashion that she treats as part of herself rather than a distraction from tennis; and a continuing connection to Delray Beach, where her family remains active in giving back. Gauff is still only twenty-two. The titles suggest a career already made. The person behind them suggests one still being written — on her own terms, in her own voice.
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