Belinda Bencic's Baby Steps

Starting small is reliably leading to bigger things for returning mothers in women's tennis.

Belinda Bencic defeated Coco Gauff 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 on Wednesday at Indian Wells, continuing apace with what’s been the most immediately successful comeback from maternity leave in the last decade of women’s tennis.

Bencic’s three-set win over Gauff avenged a three-set loss in the fourth round of the Australian Open a couple months ago. This run in Indian Wells, following on the heels of a title at the WTA 500 Abu Dhabi tournament last month, moves Bencic’s projected ranking inside the WTA Top 50.

All of this is remarkable from Bencic, who only gave birth last April 23rd, but I also think it can also be instructive to other players who are planning similar comebacks.

There have been a growing number of high-profile WTA players who have attempted returns after giving birth in recent years—you probably can name some of the most prominent ones off the top of your head—and they’ve had decidedly mixed fortunes upon return.

But as I started lining up their results, Bencic exemplified a clearly correlated recipe for success that transcended age or length of absence from tour.

Belinda Bencic looking ahead at her last pre-maternity leave major, the 2023 U.S. Open (Photo by Hameltion)

Before her big stage results this year, Bencic started her comeback far from the spotlight, playing three events below tour level late last year: an ITF 75k in Hamburg, Germany; an ITF 75k in Pétange, Luxembourg; and a WTA 125 in Angers, France.

Bencic didn’t immediately tear through those draws, but she built steadily with each appearance: she won one round at the first, two rounds at the second, and four rounds at the third.

Baby steps like that seem to be the surest path back from a baby. In my sample of nine returning players, playing ITF (or WTA 125) tournaments early in a comeback was strongly correlated with success, as measured by win percentage in the first full year back on tour. The other two players who took the ITF route, Anastasija Sevastova and Elina Svitolina, also started strong¹.

WTA 125 matches are also counted as ITFs for these statistical purposes.

Bencic, as you can see there, is tops among the nonet so far with a win rate of 81.8 percent; only Serena Williams was good enough to break into the top four without a tour through the minor leagues first.

Players besides Serena who haven’t started small haven’t started strong, and those starts generally tend to be indicative of how the remainders of their careers will go.

Bencic was asked after her win (by retirement) over Naomi Osaka in Melbourne about her decision to start off away from the tour-level; here’s that exchange with Tumaini Carayol of The Guardian about why it was “logical” for her:

Q. I wanted to ask about your decision to play the small tournaments, first of all. Sometimes when players come back from maternity leave, they maybe want to start playing the bigger tournaments, but you chose to play ITFs and build up. What was that like? Why did you decide to do that?

BELINDA BENCIC: Well, for me it's kind of, like, logical. I think you cannot just be out for a year and a half and kind of expect that you can just jump in right where you left off.

I think there is definitely something to [building] up. Obviously I think the most important for me was to see and test my body, to test also playing back-to-back matches, and obviously try to play a little bit on the lower tournaments and also work my ranking back up.

I don't really want to come here, like, from a cold start and just take wildcards and maybe, like, lose first round twice and then win a round. That's not going to help me to come back.

It's going to help me if I can really build and win matches and play matches and play three-set matches and, yeah, kind of improve myself by playing.

Bencic may have been helped by having scaled down to the ITF level several times before during injury comebacks at various points of her career.

“I have done it before; I kind of enjoy it,” Bencic said. “It's very low-key. There is no, like, circus around anything. It's just nice. It's just the tennis court, you play a match, and you go back to the hotel. It's cool.”

With the WTA’s new paid maternity leave policy, other mothers planning returns to tennis in the future could also feel more comfortable not trying to cash in as big as possible as early as possible.

With every match she continues to win this year, Bencic, who is already up to No. 10 in the WTA’s Race to Riyadh and will be No. 5 if she can beat Madison Keys in the Indian Wells quarterfinals, will show further proof that investing patiently can pay big dividends.

Thanks for reading Bounces! This is a free post, but to read everything here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! -Ben

1. Well, Sevastova didn’t technically stay strong for long, alas, as in her second WTA tournament last year she tore her ACL and hasn’t played since. But she was on the right track up until then!