Sandra Zaniewska and the quiet years behind a breakthrough

On the first Saturday of May 2026, Marta Kostyuk won the WTA 1000 title in Madrid, the biggest of her career. Applauding from her box was her coach, Sandra Zaniewska. To anyone watching that afternoon it looked like a breakthrough: somebody arrives, something clicks, a trophy is lifted. To the two of them it was the visible end of nearly three years of ordinary mornings.

Zaniewska writes about that gap with unusual clarity for someone inside the professional game. In her newsletter The Unseen Court she put it in one line.

Sit with that sentence and it turns hopeful. The long stretch of ordinary sessions is not a waiting room before the real thing. It is the real thing. That is as true on a Wednesday evening at a municipal court as it is on a centre court in Madrid.

First the human, then the tennis

Her philosophy fits into five Polish words, given in an interview in February 2026: najpierw człowiek, potem tenis. First the human, then the tennis. Plenty of people say something like it. What makes it hers is that she keeps describing what it asks of the coach.

Speaking about Kostyuk, she told Roland Garros: "I’m not living her life, she is. All I can do is give her a hug." There is no drill in that sentence and no plan. It is a coach saying where her usefulness ends, which takes more confidence than any tactical answer. Put the person first and the session stops being a transaction. The player is no longer a variable you manage on the way to a result.

She has written about the courage this takes. One of her essays is called When Coaching Looks Like Doing Nothing, and its subtitle carries the whole idea: sometimes the most useful thing you can do is not the thing that makes you feel useful. Any coach who has held back from changing a grip, when the only reason to change it was to look busy, knows the restraint that sentence describes.

She writes about the coach’s own inner weather too, in Coaches Burn Out Too, and about the gap between knowing and doing that every learner lives inside. Read together, her essays make a generous case: the relationship is the instrument, and everything technical is played on it. She has been equally clear about how few women sit in coaching boxes, telling the BBC in June 2026 that the communication and emotional intelligence women bring should be read as an asset.

Authority built out of attention

Zaniewska was born in Katowice in January 1992 and was a genuinely accomplished player. She reached world No. 25 as a junior in 2009, finished runner up in the girls’ doubles at the Australian Open that year with Aleksandra Krunić, and climbed to No. 142 in singles in 2012. In 2017, at twenty five, she stopped competing and went to learn the other half of the game.

She learned it quickly. In 2018 she began working with Petra Martić, then hovering around No. 90, and Martić rose to a career high of No. 15. A spell with Alizé Cornet followed. In July 2023 she started with Marta Kostyuk. Whatever authority she carries in a player’s ear, she built it out of attention rather than trophies, which is the same material every coach reading this has to work with.

Three years with Marta Kostyuk

Kostyuk was already known when the partnership began, a Ukrainian who had beaten a Grand Slam champion at fifteen and then spent years being called talented. What followed was a climb rather than a leap. A first major quarter final at the Australian Open in 2024. A WTA Coach of the Year nomination for Zaniewska the same year, two seasons before the trophies people now associate with her. Then Madrid, and back to back major semi finals at Roland Garros and Wimbledon in the summer of 2026.

Between those markers sit the days nobody films. A player comes off court flat for the fourth session running, and the coach has to judge whether that is tiredness, a frustration she has not put into words yet, or something happening at home. Kostyuk has also been competing throughout a war in her country, and in a week like that the coaching plan is plainly not the main thing in the room.

This is the encouraging part. The trophy did not come from a secret. It came from someone staying interested in one person, week after week, and trusting that the quiet weeks counted.

Arriving on time to your clients’ stories

Every coach reading this has a client whose breakthrough will one day look sudden to everyone except the two of them. A parent says, out of nowhere, that something has clicked. An adult beginner plays a whole set without apologising once. A pupil passes her grade exam and is congratulated on being a natural.

You were there for the earlier chapters. The lovely part of the job is being able to hand them back. A coach who can say what a client could not do in February, and what she did on Tuesday, is giving that person their own history as evidence. Hardly anyone else in their life will do that for them.

A tour coach travels with one player and a team around her. A solo coach might see twenty five people in a week, each at a different stage and each with a different thing they were working on last time. The coaches who hold all of that well are rarely doing anything elaborate. Two lines when the session ends. What we worked on, what to come back to. Ten seconds reading it before the next client walks on. Kept up for a year, that small habit becomes a record of a person growing.

What good notes give back

Keeping notes is not paperwork. It is steadiness. Development is not linear, and a flat month feels like failure while you are inside it. Notes let a coach tell the difference between a plateau and something that needs attention, and they usually reassure. Petra Martić, whom Zaniewska coached from 2018, climbed from around No. 90 to a career high of No. 15. That rise was not a straight line either. Nobody’s is. Lines only look smooth once they are drawn from far enough away.

Notes also make the best conversations possible. When a parent asks whether their child is improving, being able to say what she could not do in February, and what she did on Tuesday, lands where reassurance cannot. And when a player says the change came out of nowhere, the coach can show her where it came from: nineteen sessions, each one adding something, and here she is.

Sandra Zaniewska’s writing

Zaniewska writes about this side of the job more openly than most people at her level. Her newsletter The Unseen Court is exactly what the title promises, the part of performance that never makes the highlights. She is also building an education programme for coaches and parents called Raising Champions, with a waitlist open now.

We link to her because she describes, from the top of the professional game, the thing we built a product around. The work worth doing is mostly quiet, mostly slow, and it makes sense when somebody keeps the record.

Most coaches will never sit in a player’s box in Madrid. Almost every coach, though, is somewhere in the middle of a story like Kostyuk’s, three years out from whatever it turns into. The work that gets a player there is not glamorous. It is turning up on a wet Wednesday, paying attention, and noting what happened so next week starts where this one finished.