Who is the team behind U.S. tennis star Coco Gauff? From coach Brad Gilbert to her physio and agent

If you try to locate Coco Gauff’s father, Corey, watching his daughter playing from in the crowd during one of her matches, it could take you all match long to successfully locate him.

“My dad is here. I don’t know where. But he’s here somewhere,” Gauff revealed during last month’s Australian Open, where she made the semi-finals. “Sometimes my dad says some words that I can’t say right here... [Laughs.] [So] we agreed he can go say them somewhere else.

“If you guys see him, tell him I said, ‘Hello,’” she told post-match interviewer Jelena Dokic, the crowd joining Gauff in laughter.

It’s as funny as it is true: Corey, a former collegiate basketballer, can be credited as Coco’s first and longest-standing coach. With his wife Candi, who ran track at Florida State, Coco was introduced to tennis at age seven and began taking it more seriously after the family moved back home from Georgia to Delray Beach.

In Delray Beach, it was Gerard Loglo who was her first serious coach. (She had also been coached by Jewel Peterson when she first began the sport in the Atlanta area.)

Some 12 years later, the 2023 US Open champion and seven-time singles titlist on the WTA Tour, has only had a few guides aside from her parents.

So who is coaching her now? And what’s their role within her coaching team? We explore.

Coco Gauff: Adding Brad Gilbert as coach in 2023

After a first-round loss at Wimbledon last summer to 2020 Australian Open champion Sofia Kenin, Gauff went back to the drawing board: She returned home to Florida and decided to make a host of changes both on court and off.

She hired well-known coach Pere Riba, who had previously been working with rising Chinese star Zheng Qinwen. Days before her first event of the U.S. swing, Gauff also added Brad Gilbert to her team, the long-time coach and TV analyst who had coached the likes of Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and other top stars.

It was Riba and Gilbert – along with hitting partner Jarmere Jenkins – who would be along Gauff’s side (as well as her parents) en route to her maiden major title at the US Open, where she beat Aryna Sabalenka in a dramatic three-set final.

By season’s end, Riba was no longer on the Gauff team, citing personal reasons before re-joining the Zheng camp. (They’d make it to the Australian Open final.)

But Gauff has kept Gilbert close, and explained her relationship with Gilbert, who is known to be a no-nonsense sort of coach... who also has plenty of quirky characteristics about him, too.

“[Brad] obviously has a lot of experience in the game. I feel like he knows the things to say in the tough moments in the match sometimes,” Gauff told reporters in Beijing in October.

She continued: “We have two different personalities. Brad, he likes to say a lot. I'm more someone who can be stubborn in a way. I think being with him has allowed me to open my mind up to accept advice more... just the way he says it makes you want to do it.”

2024: Continuing with Gilbert – and bringing on Felipe Ramírez

Things are ever-evolving in the tennis world, but after Riba left the Gauff camp in November, Gilbert remained, the notable coach with Coco throughout the first major of the year in Melbourne.

There was a new face in the player box, too: Colombian Felipe Ramírez, who was in Auckland, New Zealand, for the first week of the season as Gauff captured a 7^th career singles title and remained a part of the larger team at the AO.

Ramirez was brought on in the off-season to help Gauff ready for 2024.

“I'm the one who's on a day-to-day basis with Coco; I have to be aware of the practices, her schedules, be aware of the rackets, the balls, that the court is in perfect condition... so that when she arrives to train everything is 100 percent,” Ramirez told Latin American outlet RedMas.

“This is a team,” added Ramirez. “I am not the coach that Coco has; there are very important people [Gilbert] who are directly related to this work.”

Also part of Gauff’s camp in Melbourne was physiotherapist Maria Vago, whose work with Coco dates back at least a year. She is team member tasked with tending to Coco’s body, from massages to pre-match warm-ups, post-match cool-downs and making sure the tennis star is as ready as can be to take to court.

Who else has coached Coco Gauff?

When Gauff made the US Open junior final back in 2017, she took on fellow rising American star Amanda Anisimova. While the match between the 13-year-old (Gauff), and 15-year-old Anisimova was full of watchful eyes from the tennis establishment, Gauff already had one of the sport’s most well-known coaches in her corner: Patrick Mouratoglou.

Mouratoglou has for years had his own tennis academy in France, and from 2012-22 he was the coach of Serena Williams, a period in which Serena won 10 of her 23 major singles titles – as well as Olympic gold in both singles and doubles (with Venus) at London 2012.

Gauff moved to France at age 10 to use Mouratoglou’s academy as a training base, being granted a scholarship and access to the wide array of resources there, including courts, training facilities, physios and supplemental coaches, including Jean-Christophe Faurel, who would remain on her team for several years.

"When I saw Coco Gauff at ten, I knew she was going to be an outstanding athlete," he recently told Olympics.com during an exclusive interview.

"She’s clearly the fastest and most explosive player on the circuit by a long way. She’s a real competitive player, she’s a winning player. At fifteen, she beat Venus (Williams) at Wimbledon. At sixteen, she beat Naomi Osaka, world number one in Australia. She has this winning instinct, which is a huge quality," he added.

But Mouratoglou has never taken on the role as “head coach” for Gauff, instead being a part of a larger team. Their last documented event together was Roland-Garros 2023, where Gauff lost to eventual champion Iga Swiatek in the quarter-finals.

Between 2022 and April 2023, Gauff worked with respected coach Diego Moyano, calling their time together “a great year.”

Who is Coco Gauff’s agent?

Gauff signed with Roger Federer’s agency, known as Team 8, and led by Federer’s longtime agent, Tony Godsick.

While Godsick helps to oversee the greater Gauff trajectory, her day-to-day agent is Alessandro Barel Di Sant Albano, who also represents another rising American star in Ben Shelton.

Collaborating with Andy Roddick

At the Australian Open, Gauff revealed that she had flown to Charlotte, North Carolina, during the off-season for two days of work with Roddick, particularly focused on her service delivery. Roddick, the former world No.1 and 2003 US Open champion, is known to have one of the best serves in the modern game.

"It was really cool; he's a really chill guy," Gauff told reporters. "I met him before, but never, like, obviously to that level. Yeah, I went to Charlotte for two days. Yeah, it was a really good two days. I think that my serve has improved."

She continued: "[Andy] is probably, you know, one of the best servers in history, and especially on the American side. So, yeah, I don't think I could have chosen anybody - or actually, I didn't really choose, he offered. So I don't think I could have gotten anybody else better to kind of help me with that."

Roddick, speaking on his new podcast Served, in late January, had this to say about the Gauff camp, in particular her father Corey:

"In the history of our sport... there are a lot of cautionary tales and I won’t name them out of respect for the people who are on the bad side... but it has been rampant in our sport," Roddick said.

“[Corey Gauff] has studied and he is dialled in and for him to kind of take a back seat and let Brad [Gilbert] be Brad, which is a weird orbit in itself, and let me - who he doesn’t know - have a say in her serve for a couple of days, like Bravo!" Roddick said, adding: "It needs to be said over and over again. I hope this creates precedent for other tennis parents, especially of young females.”