CHARLOTTESVILLE – Danielle Collins knew she was playing some of the best tennis of her career.
Collins knew it when she topped Sachia Vickery in the finals of a $25,000 USTA pro circuit event in Norman, Okla., in November, even though it seemed like the only people in attendance were the players’ coaches and some family members.
Collins knew it when she topped hometown favorite Monica Puig in an early-round match at the Miami Open, even though, after the win, she said she wasn’t asked to hold a press conference.
Yes, Collins knew she was on a roll long before her headline-grabbing upset of Venus Williams later that week in Miami. That’s just when everyone else took notice.
“Sometimes that can be a little bit frustrating,” Collins said. “You’re working hard and sometimes that goes unnoticed. Now that I did have a great win over Venus, it seems like everybody’s paying attention.”
And for good reason. Collins – a two-time NCAA champion at Virginia – has climbed to No. 45 in the WTA rankings, an ascent that has seen her defeat not only Williams but some of the other biggest names in American women’s tennis.
She defeated Madison Keys in straight sets in March at Indian Wells and scored a three-set victory over CoCo Vandeweghe later that month in Miami before her breakthrough defeat of the 37-year-old Williams, the No. 8 player in the world.
“For me, playing tournaments, three last year, and then how many matches I’ve played over my lifetime, I don’t really find it that surprising,” the 24-year-old Collins said by phone from her Tampa, Fla. home. “I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant, but when you put in a lot of hard work your whole life, eventually good things are going to happen.”
Collins, who started playing tennis with her father coaching her as a small child, has been working toward this goal for a long time. After a freshman season that saw her go 24-8 at Florida, she transferred to U.Va., setting up one of the most decorated individual athletic careers in the school’s championship-filled history.
Collins won NCAA singles championships as a sophomore and again as a senior, staying in school for four years and completing her degree, despite plenty of pull for her to drop out and turn pro, especially after taking second-seeded Simona Halep three sets at the U.S. Open as a junior.
“Danielle knows she didn’t skip any steps,” former U.Va. coach Mark Guilbeau said Wednesday. “People look at it as, ‘She beat Venus Williams. This is an amazing one-week progression.’ It’s the furthest thing from that. All the way from being 5 years old, working with her father, all the way through junior tennis, all the way through college tennis, and completing that process, then completing the process of the pro circuit events, she just hasn’t skipped any steps. That where I think, the substance is there.”
Guilbeau, who left U.Va. after the 2017 season, spent the final four months of the year traveling with Collins, helping her get in a rhythm in some of those smaller money events. She switched to a racket more similar to what she played with at Virginia.
His key piece of coaching advice? Get back to some of the things that helped her dominate in college.
So Collins worked on reintroducing her drop shot and inside-in forehand from the ad court to her game, two shots that are less popular in professional tennis than they are in the college game, more and more resembling an enhanced version of the championship player who starred for the Cavaliers.
Since then, she’s been working with her current coaches, Pat Harrison and Tom Hill, on some of the more traditional elements of the pro game. She’s added velocity to her serve, which she’s striking over 110 miles per hour, and packed more power into her forehand, the shot that made her so hard to beat in college.
“I think I’m playing the same game, just against different competition,” Collins said. “And I’m a more experienced Danielle.”
If a reliance on drop shots isn’t standard operating procedure in professional tennis, that suits Collins.
There’s very little about her path that is typical for an American prospect.
In a sport heavily populated by country club kids, the best of whom turn pro in their early teenage years, Collins grew up in a decidedly more humble fashion, playing on public courts in St. Petersburg, Fla., boldly approaching strangers who were playing and asking them if they’d hit with her.
Her father, Wally, a self-taught recreational player from Chicago, served as her childhood coach.
“A lot of repetition, a lot of repetition,” Wally Collins said of his approach to teaching his daughter the sport. “Focusing on one thing and staying with it for a week or a couple of weeks.”
Collins said she learned her work ethic from those sessions and from watching her parents in their professional lives. Cathy still works as a teacher and Wally, at 80 years old, still has his own landscaping business and can be found mowing lawns most mornings.
They live in Florida and can’t travel to most of her matches but were in attendance for the win over Williams.
“It was kind of surreal,” Cathy Collins said. “And it was nerve racking.”
Neither Cathy nor Wally graduated from college and that’s part of the reason Collins was so driven to complete her degree before making her push to be a professional.
“I decided I wanted to be more than a tennis player,” she said. “I wanted to go to college. I wanted to get an education. I wanted to be a well rounded person before embarking on my professional tennis journey.
“Coming from a hard-working middle class family, I understood the value of getting a college degree.”
With that completed, Collins’ next goal was to break into the Top 10 of the world rankings, and she doesn’t believe her decision to stay in college hindered that in any way.
“I can only judge off my own experiences,” Collins said. “I do what I want. I like to think I made the right choice.”
In doing so, Collins may have blazed a new path for American women, one that more and more players on the men’s side are following. John Isner spent four years at Georgia. He’s now ranked ninth in the world. Bradley Kahn and Ryan Thacher each played four years at Stanford.
“The men have started to do that,” Guilbeau said. “It’s really great to see that Danielle’s going to be one of the very few who has a four-year degree and will make it, very successfully, on the pro tour. Danielle may end up being a pioneer in that she may end up being the highest ranked.”
Of course, Collins knows first-hand, there’s no easy path to success as a tennis pro.
“You have to grind it out. You have to play a lot of matches when no one is watching. It’s nice that now I’m getting to play on big stages and have a lot of people watch me.”