The last time Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka met at the US Open, they both ended up in tears.
It was 2019, and Gauff was a scrawny 15-year-old, playing in her first US Open and only second major championship. On the other side of the net, Osaka was the defending US Open champion and No. 1.
Osaka rolled past the up-and-coming teenager, 6-3, 6-0. But what we all remember from the third-round match is what happened after: Osaka consoled a tearful Gauff and invited her to participate in the ESPN post-match interview, where both talked through tears.
“It was a tough moment for me because it was a hyped-up match. I remember looking back at it. I guess I put way too much pressure on myself thinking I maybe had a chance in that moment to actually do something, which I definitely did, but I think it was just I felt more expectation that I should than maybe belief,” Gauff said.
On Monday, the two will meet for the sixth time and only the second time at the US Open. But much has changed in the intervening six years. Osaka swelled her major championship haul to four and became a mother. Gauff collected her first two Grand Slam titles, including the 2023 US Open.
“To be at this point of my life and to be playing her again is honestly, for me, feels kind of special,” Osaka said in a press conference on Saturday.
Feelings aside, the fourth-round match represents an opportunity for Osaka to show that she’s back in a major way. This is the first time she’s reached the fourth round at a Grand Slam since she won the 2021 Australian Open. Since giving birth to her daughter, Shai, in July 2023, Osaka is 1-7 against Top-10 players.
Osaka made the Round of 16 with a three-set win against 15th seed Daria Kasatkina of Australia.
“Since I've come back I kind of wanted everything to happen really quickly. So I think it took, I keep saying like after Wimbledon, but for me to just completely not even think about results anymore and just try to focus on every match by itself,” Osaka said.
In New York, the No. 23-seed Osaka is building on newfound momentum created in Canada. After switching to her new coach Tomasz Wiktorowski, who used to coach Iga Swiatek, Osaka reached the final of the WTA 1000.
“I did good in Montreal, and now we're here. I'm just really happy about that. Definitely pleased. I think Tomasz has been really cool to work with too. As a journey, it's not something that I really pictured, but I'm glad to be living it,” Osaka said.
By result alone, Gauff’s 2025 US Open has gone to plan. But it perhaps hasn’t been the journey she envisioned traveling to the second week.
Days before the final major championship of the year, Gauff started working with new coach Gavin MacMillan, a biomechanics expert who helped 2024 US Open champion Aryna Sabalenka fix her serve, in addition to her longtime coach Jean-Christophe Faurel.
The coaching change and new service motion they’ve implemented, in addition to the inherent pressure that comes with playing at your home Grand Slam, has sometimes been too much for Gauff. She cried on-court midway through her second-round match.
On Saturday, however, Gauff skipped all the tears and troubles with a clean straight-sets win against Poland’s Magdalena Frech to advance to the US Open fourth round for the fourth consecutive year.
Notably, Gauff more than halved her double fault count (four) from an average of nine in her first two matches.
“Overall I'm definitely happy with how I played off the ground today, and the serve, I thought the percentage was great. I would love to continue to be more aggressive with it as the tournament goes,” she said.
Gauff, now 21, remembers feeling excited about the first time she played Osaka, which was a night match inside Ashe. She’s all for this rematch as well, provided it ends differently.
“It would be a cool kind of déjà vu type of situation,” Gauff said. “But hopefully it will be a different result.”
