Last night, with my heart rate still elevated from watching Coco Gauff’s epic quarterfinal comeback against Mirra Andreeva, I talked with Ryan Willison—the writer behind Courtship, a new tennis Substack—about the US Open women’s semifinalists. We dug into what’s at stake for Aryna Sabalenka, Jess Pegula, Coco Gauff, and Elena Rybakina as they fight for the championship, what you should know heading into Thursday’s semifinal matchups, and other key tournament storylines.
Enjoy, and tune in to these games tonight!
The top 4 seeds make it to the US Open semis
Christiana: As of about two hours ago, the semis were finalized: we’ve got Aryna Sabalenka and Jess Pegula, and Coco Gauff and Elena Rybakina. It’s the first time all four top seeds have reached the women’s semis since 1975. So, looking at that field, what were you tracking coming into this?
Ryan: My first Courtship newsletter was about how these were the four women that stood a chance at getting the world number one ranking. Sabalenka held that ranking for 99 consecutive weeks. Going into the US Open, any of the four could have come out the other side as world number one, depending on how they did. And we now learned today that no matter what happens after today, Rybakina will be world number one, because she won her quarterfinal.
Christiana: How does that work?
Ryan: It’s the live rankings, basically a yearly calendar, so your ranking points are really relative to how you did last year. Because Sabalenka won the Open last year, she can’t actually win any points in these two weeks — all she can do is defend her points. She got 2,000 points for last year’s Open. If she loses in the final this year, she’ll lose points, even though she made it all the way to the final. In a vacuum, that should be enough for her to remain number one, because it’s quite a feat to hold onto those 2,000 points. But she hasn’t had the best year, and she hasn’t scored the most points in other tournaments. Rybakina won the Australian Open, which she didn’t do particularly well at last year — she went out in the round of 16. So just by getting to a semifinal here, Rybakina’s now earned enough points to put herself in front.
Christiana: So it’s like, great, you got the number one spot, now turn around and defend it as best you can.
Ryan: Right, Elena Rybakina will gain more points by winning the final, but she doesn’t need to to hold on to number one — the margin is such that whether Coco, Jess, or Aryna win their semis, that will not be enough to catch her. So that was really the story I was tracking most on the women’s side, and it’s fun that even though we got a little bit of a premature ending to it, these are the four women at the end anyway. There’s still so much at stake — emotionally, resume-wise, bucket-list-wise.
The stakes: Aryna Sabalenka
Christiana: So let’s go through the stakes for each of them individually. Starting with Aryna Sabalenka.
Ryan: She’s just lost that #1 ranking, which is really hard. To get to 99 consecutive weeks, you want to hit 100. 99 weeks total already puts her in a really elite club, but still, this has got to sting. And we all know this has not been a fantastic year for her. When the hard court season started after Wimbledon — hard court is really her surface — we might have expected a little more domination from her, and instead there were early exits. She hasn’t beaten a top-10 player since Miami, which was back in the spring.
So what’s really at stake for her isn’t just proving “yes, I can still do this, you should still be afraid of me, I’m still the tiger queen.” It’s that this would be the third time in a row she’s won the US Open — the three-peat, which is so rare. She had a chance at doing it this year in Australia, and the person who took that from her was Rybakina. It’s very possible they’ll show down again in the final, and that would be an incredible story: can she get her revenge, can she get this three-peat, can she get back on top mentally and performance-wise?
Christiana: So for people who haven’t followed her year as closely, what’s the story behind her struggles lately?
Ryan: My interpretation is she has a hard time when the match isn’t already going her way. Coco knows how to do what we call “winning ugly”. Her former coach, Brad Gilbert, wrote a book called Winning Ugly, and his whole philosophy is win the match even if that means dragging your opponent down into the mud with you. That’s kind of a Coco Gauff special—she doesn’t have to play her best tennis; she’ll make sure you play your worst tennis with her, and hers will somehow be good enough.
With Sabalenka, her firepower and her weapons are so central that when they’re not firing, I don’t see her finding another gear. So I think there’s maybe a little bit of versatility and imagination missing. She’s so dominant, and when she’s not, she can unravel.
Christiana: Do you think the loss of the number 1 ranking matters to her? Or do you think she’s not even thinking about that and just wants to win the tournament?
Ryan: She probably has an attachment to number one that the other women hadn’t necessarily formed in their minds, because she had it for so long. So I do believe this stings, but she had to have come into this tournament with a much bigger goal than that, because she didn’t know how this was going to play out. I’d imagine her larger motivation is to prove what a champion she is. To have been number one for as long as she has, but not been able to beat the people at her elite level for going on five months now, I think that’s actually the fire under her. If I were in her shoes, this would really be about reestablishing what her name means and the kind of dominance she’s tasted in the past, especially at this point of the year — from now through next March we’re on hard court, so she wants to scare the other women a little. I’m rooting for all of them in different ways, but as Sabalenka fans, we’ve had a hard time knowing she can play better than this, because it has to be mental — the skill is there.
Christiana: I’m curious: Do you think it’s better for her opponents that she just lost the number one ranking now, because maybe it knocks her confidence going into semis? Or should they actually be more scared, because now she has something to prove?
Ryan: I wish it were the latter. It’s a better story; I love the idea of her going in fired up. And no matter how she performs, she will be fired up. She’s not one to come in cool as a cucumber. But looking at her past results in these high-stakes, something-to-prove moments, I’m actually not sure that’s where we see her best tennis. So if I’m the other three…obviously Rybakina’s thrilled this happened, since she’s the one who has number one now. But even if you’re Coco or Jess, I think you’re feeling a little bit better that this happened before the semis.
The stakes: Jess Pegula
Christiana: Let’s move on to Jess Pegula, who will be playing Sabalenka in the semis. What’s the story for Pegula here?
Ryan: If I had to give it to you in one sentence: always the bridesmaid, never the bride. She’s performed at an incredibly high level for a while now—a top-five, top-ten staple—and has never won a Grand Slam. That’s not very rare on the men’s side, because we’ve had the dominance of the Big Three—Federer, Nadal, Djokovic—and now Sinner and Alcaraz. On the women’s side, part of why I prefer women’s tennis is the sheer unpredictability. You have so many one-time Slam winners. I think this year alone, and it extends into last year, every Grand Slam has had a unique winner. That’s what’s so fun: the suspense of it all. So if you’re Pegula thinking, “How has it never been my turn? I know how to beat these players, but I don’t know how to win the big one,” she’s got yet another chance to do it. There’s just not necessarily an indicator that there’s a deeper well or another gear for her to shift into when she gets there. American tennis fans always love a hometown favorite, and I think the odds are on Coco, just because of past performance. Even a few years ago, when the Netflix documentary series Break Point came out, you could hear the pain in Jess’s voice when she was talking about how a Grand Slam win hadn’t happened for her yet. Fast-forward to 2026 and it’s still the same story. So I think for her, it’s a story she’s absolutely ready to rewrite.
Christiana: Has she made it to a lot of finals before, and it’s just never dropped her way?
Ryan: For singles, she’s got to one major final—the 2024 US Open—and she lost to Sabalenka. Making it to finals isn’t really a staple of her career outside the Slams either. She has won some titles already this year, but the most recent one was in April. Coco has a much more recent one, from Cincinnati. I think if this plays out and she can get to the final, it would be the sign of a new level for her.
Semi-Final Matchup: Sabalenka vs Pegula
Christiana: So that’s a big thing at stake — proving she can do it, and tomorrow being a rematch of that final. What are you thinking about going into their matchup?
Ryan: They’ve played 13 times, Sabalenka’s won nine of them. On paper she’s the favorite, but obviously anything can happen — they both played really tough three-set matches yesterday, with points where it looked like the match was slipping out of their hands before they clawed their way back. I think the question is just which version of each of them shows up. It’d be exciting to watch the underdog shock us all.
Christiana: Anything on the style of play you’re looking at?
Ryan: They’re both incredibly flat hitters. Not to get too into the weeds with technique, but that’s what distinguishes them from a Coco Gauff or an Iga Świątek, who hit with a lot of topspin and really like to shape the ball. Sabalenka and Pegula clobber it flat — Sabalenka with even more power, while Pegula is known more for her depth and consistency rather than everything being a straight-up winner. I believe she’s known for having the flattest shot shape across the entire top 100 of the women’s tour. That’s not necessarily a detriment against a Sabalenka, since she’s going to hit you a flat ball back too. But if she makes it into a final against a Coco, where the ball has more shape, that’s the clash of the titans — and it’s often a disadvantage to the flat hitter, because Coco’s ball bounces really high, and hitting that flat can just sail long.
The Stakes: Coco Gauff
Christiana: Perfect segue over to Coco. Her match today almost killed me. Tell me about your thoughts on Coco coming into this tournament, and what it all means for her.
Ryan: Coco is the hometown favorite — she’s not from New York, she’s from Florida, but New York really claims her as their own, as all of America does. She’s so beloved. She’s 22 years old and still somehow feels like the most mature player on tour. She’s so graceful speaking on anything from her own shortcomings to issues with decisions made at the institutional level. You can’t help but root for her. Sometimes I emotionally struggle to root for her because it’s just too stressful — this time last year I said, “Coco, love you girl, I gotta pick another favorite ‘cause you’re gonna kill me.”
Christiana: Sometimes we have to take a tolerance break even from our favorites. What else should we know about Coco going into these finals?
Ryan: The on-paper story for her is: can she win the US Open again, after winning it all in 2023? But the more interesting story is that she parted ways with her coach last year because she knew something wasn’t working.
There have been persistent issues in her game — her serve and her forehand, both really important shots; some would say the two most important shots. A good serve wins you a lot of free points, but Coco’s led the tour in double faults the last two years. She’s constantly giving points away, and if she wasn’t as mentally tough as she is, that would break another player. Her forehand is so error-prone that if you watch a Coco match knowing that, you’ll see every ball that comes in goes to her forehand — opponents don’t want to send it to the other side, because it’s more consistent. So at her young age, she was smart enough to recognize she needed a change, and brought in Gavin MacMillan, a biomechanics and serve expert who, funnily enough, fixed Sabalenka’s serve several years ago. Sabalenka used to be so mired in her double faults she’d cry on court mid-match, and now her serve is a weapon.
We’re already starting to see it with Coco — she won Cincinnati, the big lead-up tournament right before the Open, and it felt like everything clicked — all the pieces of her game came together into one whole. It’s been exciting to wonder: does that mean she’ll pull it off here too, across seven matches? I’ve been ready to see her win from the beginning—and I say that as someone who, a year ago, kind of disowned her as a stan—she’s made that much progress. Today was kind of the first sign that maybe there’s still some inconsistency, but I give her the benefit of the doubt that it was one match, and if anything, surviving it gives me even more hope. So I think the Coco Gauff story right now is: is my new and improved game as new and improved as I think it is? Is this where I get to say, as much as I’ve accomplished by 22, I’m still just getting started; I’m only going to keep getting better? And I think the answer, if she can win the US Open, would be a resounding yes.
The Stakes: Elena Rybakina
Christiana: Tell me about Elena Rybakina — she just became the world number one in the rankings. What’s at stake for her this last weekend?
Ryan: She’s such an interesting, enigmatic figure on tour, from her level of consistency to her demeanor. She’s mostly known for how little emotion she shows. After she won the Australian Open, she barely looked like she’d won a point, like it was a casual match against a friend.
Christiana: She’s incredibly stoic. I feel like that sets her apart from these other women.
Ryan: Right, it’s so much easier to map the emotional stakes onto these other players because they’ll show them to you. Today, when she got the world number one ranking, she was just like “cool.” Big moments of emotion are just not her thing.
But getting to world number one — it’s the first time she’s ever gotten here — is a huge achievement, especially for someone who won Wimbledon in 2022 and then didn’t have a whole lot else to her name until this year. That’s three and a half years of “will I ever get back to that peak?” Then she wins the Australian Open this January, but then she went a little more MIA than you’d expect again.
She had an ankle injury that pulled her out of Cincinnati right before this tournament, and in the middle of “can she reach world number one,” a lot of us assumed that chance was over for her. Instead, she comes here and plays her ass off. One thing I love about her: when she’s on, I don’t know that anyone can beat her — she’s breathtaking to watch.
Her story is really: I’ve gone through so many ups and downs, faced so many doubts, internal and external, just gotten through an injury that should have taken this away from me, and now I’ve achieved it — world number one. Can I cap it off in style? Can I get the kind of result that lets me actually hold onto it?
Christiana: Whoa, that’s a lot of factors for her going into this. There are a couple of ways one could think about her situation. She overcomes this injury, she’s flying through the draw, she becomes world number one. Now it’s almost like she doesn’t have anything to lose. Or, she could feel like this is her moment to underline why she deserved that number one spot and silence her naysayers.
But she’s so stoic, maybe that doesn’t even compute for her — maybe she’s just “I like tennis, and I’m good at this,” which has got to be a huge asset, I’d think, because we have these other women here whose success can be at the mercy of how they’re feeling that day.
Ryan: Definitely. In tennis, some players use their emotion as fuel; other players slip on it like a banana peel. Sabalenka’s emotional, and for her it can go either way. With Rybakina, I don’t know if it’s just the outward appearance or if it’s actually her lived experience, but she’s so even-keeled and equally detached from the outcome — and that really can be a gift, like you said. Even Sabalenka said she thinks part of why she won her quarterfinal against Noskova was that she started telling herself she had already lost, she had nothing left to lose, and that’s when you start playing free. So maybe that’s Rybakina’s secret sauce too — the more muted intensity lets her play like she doesn’t give a shit. Even though of course she does — living out of a suitcase, surgeries for injuries you’ve sustained, you have to give a shit. There’s no way she doesn’t.
Semi-Final Matchup: Gauff vs Rybakina
Christiana: Thinking of these two, Coco and Elena — what are you looking for in this matchup?
Ryan: I think this match is going to be the more interesting of the two semifinals. Their attitudes are similar — both incredibly calm under pressure — so I don’t think we’ll necessarily see fireworks in emotional displays, but I think we will in the shot-making.
Coco plays with so much variety, and she’s an incredible doubles player, so she loves coming to the net and doing things that are outside other players’ comfort zones. What she’s really known for that I haven’t touched on yet is her incredible defense — she’s just an athlete; she’ll run down any ball. I guarantee there’ll be points tomorrow that become the new highlight reel, where she runs corner to corner to corner about ten times, past the point where it stops making sense, and then wins the point anyway. You can never count her out. And that’s what you get with Elena Rybakina, who, when her accuracy is dialed in, hits the ball so fast and so cleanly and so close to the line that if you can’t move like Coco, you’re done. So I think they’re perfectly set up to handle each other.
What’s interesting is we don’t have a lot of data on how they play each other — they’ve only played each other twice, and their head-to-head is tied 1:1. Coco won their first matchup when she was 19 at the 2022 Canadian Open, but when they met most recently this year, Rybakina won. So I think this one’s pretty impossible to call. Coco can win whether she plays her A or her B level, but I think Rybakina needs her A level, because her B level has a steeper drop-off — she plays without a ton of margin, so she’s gotta be nailing it. I think this could’ve been the final, just in terms of sheer unpredictability.
Christiana: This might be the most interesting matchup we have here.
US Open Women’s Finals Predictions
Christiana: What’s your ideal final matchup?
Ryan: Not to knock Jess Pegula, I think she’s so talented, I just don’t find her tennis as compelling as the other three. If our final ends up being Coco versus Sabalenka, the story is so there — Coco’s beaten her at the US Open, she beat her at the French Open last year, she knows exactly how to frustrate Sabalenka, and when you frustrate Sabalenka, that’s when you get the fireworks and the screams — that can be really electrifying TV.
When Coco beat Sabalenka at the French Open, Sabalenka was so bitter she gave a really shady press conference afterward, basically saying, “Well, Coco didn’t win, I lost.” Though they patched it up and made a TikTok together, you have to wonder if there’s a wound there. I’d be excited for that rematch.
And for Rybakina and Sabalenka — here’s the player who just took your crown, and here’s the player who stole your Australian Open title in January, so are you going to let her take this one too? Either one would be a great final, honestly — those stories are pretty damn good.
Christiana: So what’s your prediction — who’s in the final, and who wins?
Ryan: My gut says it’s a Coco-Sabalenka final, and Coco wins. That felt dialed in until today’s Coco match gave me a little pause — but Rybakina didn’t have a great match either; she figured it out and turned it around, and she raised her level more than Coco did to get the win. I just think either of them beats Sabalenka this year, which is bittersweet to say out loud, because Sabalenka’s so good that you want her to take home more of these.
Other Key US Open storylines
Christiana: Our focus is on these four women, but there have been a lot of cool stories at this Open — from both the women’s side and the men’s side, and all the cultural stuff around the tournament. What else have you been paying attention to?
Ryan: One storyline not connected to these four is Qinwen Zheng. She was in the top 10, an incredibly dominant player two years ago — she beat Iga Świątek at the Paris Olympics for gold, on a court that was absolutely Iga’s to lose, since they played at Roland Garros, where Iga had won four times. Then Zheng faced an injury, and her ranking fell all the way to number 121. She had to play qualifying matches for this US Open, so she played three more matches than these other women before the tournament even started. She only just lost today to Rybakina. I saw an interview she did with Jessica Schiffer, who runs Hardcourt, one of the best tennis Substacks out there, where she talks about what that does to you mentally — representing your country, being a Chinese player who’s sort of alone in the echelon she used to occupy, since there weren’t a lot of other Chinese players even near the top 10. There was so much weight on her shoulders, and not being able to find her footing again took her to a dark place at times. So I was really happy to see her make a deep run — she even won the first set against Rybakina. Zheng could have won that match, and we could have been talking about her instead. I think that’s a really beautiful story.
Christiana: I’m happy for her; that’s great. I also thought Taylor Townsend has had a really cool U.S. Open story. She had a great singles run, and her star feels like it’s rising, too. She did a fashion pop-up in Bed-Stuy here in Brooklyn, and she’s so authentic with the press — she’s like a Coco in that way, but rawer. I feel really drawn to how she carries herself.
Ryan: I wrote about her in my piece going up Friday, because I think we should all be watching her doubles final — she just won her semifinal with Katerina Siniakova, and the two of them together are unstoppable. They’ve been number one in doubles for a while now, and that’s what I love watching even when Taylor plays singles — she brings that doubles mentality, goes to the net, and does anything up there because she’s such a lethal weapon in doubles. It’s never a dull moment watching her, and she brings something a lot of other players don’t have. I’d love to see her win the US Open in doubles, and honestly I think she will — I never bet against those two.
I agree that’s not necessarily a new story for her, since she’s so dominant in doubles all the time. But what does feel new is the way she’s claiming her space as a star. I think a lot of other players focus on the tennis, and then the brands either get excited about them or they don’t. Taylor feels like someone charting her own path, saying, “I’ve decided what I want my uniform to look like, and I don’t necessarily need it to come from a big brand’s department — I’ll fashion it myself.” You can feel that, and you can see how hard people ride for her in the comments — she’s collected a really loyal following. I think it’s smart and inspiring to lean into that. Because honestly, in this world, women’s doubles doesn’t always get the respect it deserves; at the institutional level, they keep cutting resources for it, and the stories don’t get told. She feels like one of the few breakout stars we have.
Christiana: It’s so cool to see trailblazers like her in a tennis world that can be strict about how things are done and how people get deals. Black women have a legacy of doing that in tennis, obviously. She’s exactly where she belongs on this stage. Anything on the men’s side you’ve been loving before we close out?
Ryan: Now that Carlos Alcaraz is out of the tournament, I’ve been feeling Ben Shelton, too. And I have been since before Djokovic lost — I made Ben my winner prediction last week. If we get Coco and Ben as our US Open winners, to have two Americans…And the first American man to win the US Open since Andy Roddick did in 2003, and the first Black male player to win since Arthur Ashe. And to do that alongside Coco, who is also just an incredible trailblazer for Black athletes, I just can’t imagine a better story.
Christiana: It’s just so fun to root for them. And with Shelton and Tiafoe facing off in the men’s semis, a Black American man is guaranteed to reach the US Open final for the first time since Arthur Ashe. I grew up playing tennis, but this is the first year I’m following the Open to the extent that I feel the anguish of this sport. There’s something about individual athletes vs team sports where it is just so personal and intimate, seeing them get frustrated and looking at their coaches and doing all these things. It impacts me so much.
Ryan: I don’t know if you saw that emotional moment between Frances Tiafoe and Alex Michelsen after Tiafoe won. It was tragic, but it was beautiful, too, and it just reminds you what it’s like. You don’t have a team that’s shouldering that loss with you. There’s no teammate. Andre Agassi, in his memoir Open, calls it the loneliest sport. Not only is it individual, but your opponent is also very far away from you. You’re these two gladiators surrounded by cheering fans, but you don’t ever make contact. Even when they cross at the changeover sides after the odd-numbered games, they don’t look at each other; they don’t talk to each other. It’s very isolating.
It makes these moments of victory so much more impactful. I’ll be so thrilled for whoever wins, and I just have to hope that whoever loses can carry it without letting it turn into scar tissue, because the great thing about tennis is there’s just always another tournament on the horizon — the momentum shifts just never stop.
Christiana: Before we close out, can you tell us about Courtship? What can readers expect?
Ryan: Courtship is written for tennis fans who already follow the game but are looking for a different conversation around it; I talk about these players like I’m in a group chat, bringing you their lore, keeping it real without denigrating anyone. What I think I offer that you won’t get from legacy media, or even some other Substacks that have relationships with these brands, is a really unvarnished take and a personal connection to the sport.
But if you’re someone who loves women’s sports and tennis is new to you, I’d encourage you to check us out, too — I’m breaking it down week by week, as an ongoing story of who these people are and why this week in tennis matters in a larger context. That’s what you need when you jump into any new sport — someone to hold your hand and tell you why it all matters, and why it’s worth staying up till 3 a.m. for a match.