The girl who wanted a one-handed backhand

Lilli Tagger was nine years old in the winter of 2017 and 2018. In an indoor hall in Lienz in East Tyrol, she walked over to her father between drills and asked if she could try a one-handed backhand. Her father, Stephan, ran the sessions. She had been playing tennis since she was five and had a solid two hander already. The one hander was a shot she had picked up during rallies for fun. She wanted to make it her real backhand.

Stephan hesitated. He could see she had some feel for the shot. He also knew what saying yes would cost. A girl her size would need to build the core strength for it. Her level would drop for a while. There would be months of patient reps that produced nothing visible on a scoreboard. The safe answer was no. The honest one was harder.

The coach who arrived at the right time

Around the same winter, the family began working with a New Zealand developmental coach named Mark Carruthers. Carruthers had grown up a junior national champion in New Zealand and played for the country from the age of ten. A shoulder injury and, by his own account on a later podcast, some hard mental health years cut the playing side short at sixteen. He came to coaching in his mid twenties with a degree in history and journalism. He had already worked with young players in Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore and Germany before settling in Austria with his wife and two children. Carruthers believed in the one-handed backhand, and in the slower Italian way of building a young player, technique first, results later.

After a tournament at the end of January 2018, Lilli sat in the car on the drive home and wrote him a note. Her mother later published the line word for word on the family site: "Mark, kannst du mir bitte die Einhänder Rückhand beibringen." Mark, can you please teach me the one-handed backhand.

The next day they started. There was no ceremony. There was a girl who wanted to change her shot and a coach who agreed she could. Her mother described the mood in the months that followed with one of Lilli's own lines: "It is so cool and I have so much fun training." No day of doubt is recorded.

What the change looked like

The rebuild was not a stunt. She kept the ball-school habits she had been raised on. The red-yellow ball, then the orange, then the green. She had grown up on a shrunken court, attacking the net, chasing volleys. Serve and volley was the shot that made her heart lift, her mother wrote at the time. The one hander was added into a game that already knew how to move forward.

For roughly a year the new backhand lagged behind everything else she could do. She played tournaments in her age group and lost points she used to win. She kept turning up. In one telling of the story, on the WTA site years later, Lilli described the change as a bet with her coach: if she won a particular event, they would make the switch permanent. She won the event. The wording is looser than the note in the car, but the shape is the same. A young player who read her own game, and a coach who trusted her enough to let the reading count.

What happened next

Lilli moved to Italy to train at thirteen. Two years later she started working with Francesca Schiavone, the 2010 French Open champion, who plays a one-handed backhand herself. In June 2025 Lilli won the girls singles title at Roland Garros without dropping a set, the first Austrian to win a junior singles Grand Slam. She was seventeen. She ran into the stands after the match to embrace Schiavone.

On the professional side the graph is steeper still. She began 2025 ranked outside the top seven hundred. By early 2026 she had reached her first WTA final in Jiujiang, run to the final of the Mumbai 125, and broken into the top hundred. Every profile written about her opens on the backhand. Almost every profile fast-forwards past the coach who let her have it in the first place.

The part of the story that gets skipped

The Schiavone chapter is the easy one to tell. A junior Grand Slam champion and a senior Grand Slam champion, on the same court, teaching the same shot. It is a good chapter. It is not the first chapter. The first chapter is a father in a Lienz hall who did not know whether to say yes, and a developmental coach who did. The one-handed backhand that shows up on television now is the shot people slow the replay for. They agreed on it together in a small indoor hall in a mountain town, when the player was nine.

The two of them did something quietly radical. They took the child's own reading of her game seriously. Not as a preference to indulge. As a piece of information. A player who at nine years old could feel that a one hander suited the way her arm moved was a player worth listening to. The coaches who backed her had to accept that their own eyes might be reading her body less accurately than she was reading it from the inside. Most youth setups do not make that trade.

What a private coach can take from this

The useful lesson is not the shot. The useful lesson is the conversation before the shot. A young player told two adults what she wanted her game to become, and both adults treated it as a real question rather than a phase. One of them asked, honestly, whether it was the right call. The other one agreed to do the work. Neither of them dressed the moment up. There was a note, then there was a first session, then there was a year of quiet loss of level, then there was everything else.

The other lesson is time. Nothing in this story happened quickly. She asked to change the shot at nine. The one hander lagged for the best part of a year, then slowly caught up, then became the shot she was known for. Seven years passed between the note in the car and the trophy in Paris. Most of that time no one outside the family and Mark saw the work. That is roughly how long relationships like this take. A father who kept turning up. A coach who kept turning up. The private coach who keeps turning up is the point of the whole enterprise.