Stepping out of "That Shadow"
Franklin Tiafoe, twin brother of Frances, has found his own place in tennis as coach of Hailey Baptiste.
PARIS, France — After a season in which she cracked the WTA Top 100 for the first time, Hailey Baptiste found herself without a coach at the end of last year.
This wasn’t unprecedented for her: she’d often traveled the tour on her own, for better and worse.
“Just kind of thugging it, battling my way through matches,” Baptiste said. “Lose a match, didn't really have anyone to talk to afterwards…had to do the whole debrief process by myself. You just learn things about yourself and about the game.”
Baptiste, a 23-year-old Washington D.C.-native now ranked 70th, enjoyed the intellectual challenge of figuring out how to win on her own, but she also knew that competing without someone in your corner isn’t easy.
“It's really tough being at a tournament and you don't have anybody on the sideline to pump you up and give you motivation,” Baptiste said in an interview with Bounces this week at Roland Garros. “Especially if you're down in a match or you're having a close battle, it can make a big difference.”
As Baptiste was preparing to start this 2025 season with a trip to Australia on her own, she began a conversation with a friend named Franklin she’d known since childhood.
“He's kind of always been somebody who's helped me since I was a young kid,” Baptiste said. “He's always kind of been there and a part of my game, so that was easy.”
When they talked about Australia in the off-season, Franklin told Baptiste that he “didn’t want her to go alone,” so he agreed to make the trip with her in an official coaching role for the first time.
Baptiste had known Franklin for years, but most tennis fans might only recognize him by his last name: Tiafoe.
On a list of most notable tennis figures born on January 20, 1998 in Hyattsville, Maryland, Franklin Tiafoe is definitely in the top two, but a distant second behind his fraternal twin brother, Frances.
Frances Tiafoe’s origin story in the sport—including sleeping as a toddler in a storage room at the tennis center where his father was employed as a maintenance worker—is well-known tennis legend at this point. But what’s often glossed over in that origin story is that Franklin was right there alongside Frances the whole time.
“I guess a lot of people know my story through my brother,” Franklin said in an interview with Bounces.
Frances and his family’s story gained notice when he won the prestigious Les Petits As tournament in France against the world’s best 14-and-under players, a victory that put Frances in the spotlight for both media and sponsors.
Franklin had also trained in tennis at the Junior Tennis Champions Center (JTCC) in College Park, Md. where their father worked, but his tennis didn’t take off in the same way. “My brother excelled, he did very well,” Franklin said. “And there wasn't that many resources going around, so I wasn't playing too many tournaments.”
Franklin said he was “finding his own path” in tennis, but it didn’t lead to any of the same places as it took Frances.
While Frances was playing elite junior tournaments around the world and dipping into his first professional events, Franklin played varsity tennis for DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville. (Alphina Kamara, the twins’ mother, sweetly made sure to note—in her own recitation of Franklin’s tennis bona fides to Bounces—that Franklin was a team captain on that DeMatha high school tennis team.)
“I did want to eventually play professionally,” Franklin said. “But I didn't have it.”
Franklin did play some collegiate tennis at Salisbury University in Maryland’s Eastern Shore region.
“I played there for like a year, year-and-a-half; then I left—my grades weren't great,” he said. “So I had to get them back up in the community college. And then COVID hit, and then I just kind of focused on studies for a little bit. And then I got into coaching.”
Franklin said he started coaching with the Washington Tennis and Education Foundation, and at a Maryland HBCU, Morgan State University. After bouncing between Maryland and Florida for years, late last year he returned to Florida to help Baptiste, who had also begun her tennis journey at JTCC, with her off-season training. (Baptiste is also working now with a second coach, Eric Hechtman, who may be best known as a former coach of late-career Venus Williams.)
Baptiste said Franklin is “a bit more mellow” than his brother. But really, who wouldn’t seem low-key next to Frances Tiafoe, a boisterous goofball who has always owned his self-described “class clown” personality.
“I love to spice things up; I hate a quiet room,” Frances said in 2018. “Always gotta be center of attention.”
Add in the tennis success Frances had from an early age—which grew steadily into tennis superstardom as an adult—and Frances acknowledges that he has been a lot for Franklin to have to stand beside.
“I think the biggest thing is being ‘Frances Tiafoe's Twin Brother,’” Frances said of Franklin’s greatest challenge. “I think getting out of that is very, very tough. He was living in that shadow and figuring out who he is as an individual. That was very tough: a lot of limelight on me, and him trying to find his own way.”
It is clear from how Franklin speaks about Frances, however, that there is no resentment about the gulf in tennis success between his twin and himself.
“Having my brother be able to do that, he's living the dream like we both had,” Franklin said of Frances. “So for me, it's a blessing. I don't really see it any like negative way, especially since I'm still, very much so, a part of the game.”
Long before this stint with Baptiste, Franklin had been a sort of proto-coach as a teenager for his brother, often Frances’ only traveling companion as he played elite junior events like the US Boys 18s in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and then on the ATP Challenger circuit. Franklin recalled the match at a 2016 Challenger in Stockton, California, in which Tiafoe beat Mackenzie McDonald to clinch his debut in the ATP Top 100.
“I witnessed him ‘on the come up,’” Franklin said, referring to Frances’ early career slogan #BigFoeOnTheComeUp.
Frances said he owes some of that early success to Franklin.
“I think that was the beauty early in my career: going to some Challengers and some other things with him, and him just pushing me and believing in me,” Frances said. “I think the guy just took me to a whole 'nother level. He was like, ‘Look, man: whatever you do—win, lose, draw—I'm always going to love you, but the sky's the limit for you.’ He just kind of exudes confidence in people he's around because he's such a joy to be around.”
Frances said that while “there is not a guy who wants to see me do better,” he also appreciated Franklin’s bluntness and honesty, which he acknowledged many people in a tennis player’s entourage can lack, nervous to do anything to jeopardize their cash cow.
“He's a very direct guy,” Frances said of Franklin. “When he tells you something, like, even if you don't want to hear it, you know it's coming from love. Sometimes when you do something that's a high level, you have people around you, they may say what they want to say, but they sugarcoat it a little bit because people worry about their jobs; this, that, and the other. My brother—I can't get rid of my brother, you know what I'm saying? When we get in an argument, I've got to see him later. Mom's like, ‘Get y'all's asses over here and figure this out,’ you know what I mean?”
That family dynamic extends to Baptiste, whom the Tiafoe brothers both call a “little sister”—which they also call another JTCC alumna, Robin Montgomery. Baptiste said that close rapport with Franklin makes her more comfortable around him than she has been with prior coaches.
“I'm laughing all day with him,” she said. “And I'm able to take my anger out on him, and he doesn't get mad at me all the time.”
There can be tennis benefits, too, to that closeness, Baptiste believes.
“He knows me very well, so I think that he's able to tap into the mental side in a way that maybe some coaches won't be able to,” Baptiste said of Franklin. “He's seen me throughout every stage of my career and my life. I mean, nobody else is going to know me like that.”
That closeness has gone both ways between the tight-knit Tiafoe and Baptiste families. Franklin said that Hailey’s father, Quasim Baptiste, was always looking out for him and his brother. “My parents worked a lot, so we didn't do normal things, like go to the movies and stuff like that,” Franklin said. “But her dad would come and pick me and Frances up, and we'd go to movies. Sometimes he'll throw us a little money for dates, like little things like that. He's definitely like a second dad.”
As Frances grew into a top ATP star, Franklin often tagged along at major events—no longer needed to help out like he did when Frances was in his #BigFoeOnTheComeUp era, but just to be there.
As he watched from the stands, Franklin said, he was learning.
“I went to a bunch of his bigger matches; I was there for the Nadal match [at the 2022 U.S. Open],” Franklin said. “So I'm just like implementing all of the stuff from those experiences to Hailey.”
Even after years floating on the sidelines, this opportunity for Franklin wasn’t a given. Knowing the ups and downs Franklin has had to reach this point, Frances said that he foremost “just love[s] seeing the guy happy.”
“To be able to do something that actually means a lot to him—it's not just coaching tennis,” Frances said. “It's bigger than that.”
Frances was also effusive about Baptiste.
“Incredible to see what she's doing,” he said. “Incredible to see Hailey believing in it, winning matches and winning matches—and having Franklin there.”
Both brothers are reliably there for Baptiste when she needs them—right after our interview for this story, she called Frances on Facetime.
“Hopefully they can also join me in the fourth round,” said Frances, who advanced to that stage of the French Open for the first time in his career on Friday with a straight-sets win over Sebastian Korda.
Baptiste, already into the third round of a major for the first time here, will face 68th-ranked Jessica Bouzas Maneiro on Saturday afternoon on Court 14 for a chance to go one step further.
Instead of “on the come up,” Franklin has his own tagline for Baptiste.
“I call her Dark Horse,” he said of Baptiste, “because I think she is, in every tournament she plays.”
Franklin said he didn’t feel like he had anything he needed to prove in his new role.
“But I don't do anything to be second-rate,” he said. “So I feel like for myself, yeah, I have something to prove. To anyone else? No. I don't think anyone would see me and expect much from me, but I'm a dog. Like, I want to win. I came out to Paris to win. Like, it's a cool city, but, I want to see her to go all the way.”
The twins’ mother, Alphina, has been courtside at Roland Garros this week to support both her son the player and her son the coach. She told me that seeing both Frances and Franklin working their way into the middle of the French Open has been immensely rewarding.
“I am so proud of them,” she said. “I am blessed. I don't take it for granted. I am humble. And I thank God for everything that He's doing for me and my family.”
After I had asked a couple questions about Franklin in his post-match press conference on Friday, Frances also expressed gratitude—in a way I didn’t expect.
“I love my brother to death,” Frances said. “…Thanks for asking about him. Means a lot.”
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