Fresh off a doubles win at the French Open and with her sights set on her first Olympic Games, tennis champion Coco Gauff is flexing her creative muscle. The 20-year-old teamed up with UPS as part of its “Be Unstoppable” campaign to highlight Gen Z entrepreneurs. In an anime-inspired video titled, “Coco vs. The Doubters,” Gauff shows how she is fueled by doubters who say that young people are too inexperienced to achieve their dreams.
Gauff cemented herself in the professional tennis world at just 15 when she defeated Venus Williams at Wimbledon qualifiers. A few years later, she won the 2023 U.S. Open, and went viral for her speech about people who thought she couldn’t do it. “Thank you to the people who didn't believe in me…I tried my best to carry this with grace, and I've been doing my best, so honestly to those who thought they were putting water on my fire, you were really adding gas to it, and now I'm really burning so bright right now,” she said at the time. While she had plenty of supporters over the years, there was no shortage of people who said she was too young to accomplish what she had.
Now, it’s all coming full circle for the tennis champ as UPS releases a limited edition “Coco vs. The Doubters,” box, and is set to donate $25,000 to Junior Achievement, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization focused on youth entrepreneurship.
In light of the partnership Teen Vogue chatted with Gauff about everything from pre-match rituals to dealing with social media noise.
Teen Vogue: Can you give us a little background about the UPS campaign and how your love of anime fits into it?
Coco Gauff: So the campaign was inspired by my speech after the US Open. It resonated with a lot of people. [UPS] really loved the idea of anime and tying it into small business owners and how people can sometimes say, ‘you're too young to do this,’ or ‘you should work a traditional job.’ I realized that there were similarities in the things that are said to both me as an athlete and to those as business owners. I met three of them when we were doing the actual filming of the commercial, Colin, Ben, and Kirsten and basically some of the things that they were being told like, ‘You should focus on just your school, or you should focus on this. Do you think this is going to work out? Or are your goals too big?,’ people tell me you’re too.
[They say] ‘your goals are a little bit delusional.’ ‘You should just focus on tennis.’ ‘You shouldn't try to branch into other things.’ So I found that it was quite similar. And then the anime part was just the fun, creative side that they kind of did to tie that idea together.
TV: A doubter is obviously someone that can motivate you, but it certainly could knock your confidence in a lot of ways too. And I know a lot of young athletes deal with that on a very large scale. So I'm curious, how do you balance it?
CG: Yeah, when I first got on tour, there would be a lot of praise initially because I was 15 nobody expected me to do anything, and so neither did I, but I just kind of did really well. Now all of a sudden it's like I'm still 15 or 16 years old, but people are expecting me to do all of these things. And then obviously, yes, I'm playing a sport, but normally there's learning curves. I probably wasn't performing as well as people would've liked, but it was as well as I could ever hope for. I wasn't expecting to be on tour until I was maybe 19 or 20 to now. And so I think I started to let other people's opinions based on how I view myself. But I'm one of those people that is very stubborn and if you tell me I can't or no, especially with my parents, I'll go the other way.
So I was like, how can I trick my mind to believe these people are motivating me? And I was like, I'm going to prove them wrong. And that's kind of how I was able to flip my mindset. The words and the doubts and the things that people say are still there. It is not like it's gone, but you can choose how you can take something if we can't control, I can't control everything that I'll see, but if I can choose how I take it, that's kind of the choice you have to make if you still want to be on social media and you're going to see that stuff. So that's kind of the choice I took.
TV: How do you interact with social media? Are you on it? Do you take breaks?
CG: I'm mainly on Instagram and TikTok. I will say Twitter is a crazy place and people can be really mean on there. So I do try not to get on it as much, but I'll try to do it once a week because I do like to see what people are saying and, there's always people writing nice things. Like yesterday I went on and I saw a girl had drawn an incredible drawing of me. So that's the part of me that doesn't want to completely abandon it because it's like there's 99% more good than bad, but it still doesn't make it tough. But I am pretty active on it. I think TikTok is my favorite platform though. It's also just a younger audience and I feel like younger people are more understanding.
TV: You just were at the French Open and you won the Women’s Doubles. That was the first time you won that, right?
CG: It was a really crazy experience because I wasn't planning on playing doubles, but because my partner got hurt and [Katerina Siniakova’s] partner also got hurt three days before the tournament and she texted me and asked ‘would you want to play?’ I already had in my mind I wasn't going to play doubles, but she's won seven Slams, so I thought okay, I probably would have a good shot to win with her, just she's done it already so many times. So I said, okay, eff it. Let's just go for the vibes and see what could happen. It was our first time playing together and usually I've never had a good record of playing with people for the first time and doing it successfully, but with her every match became easier. It was really cool, and winning a double was something I always wanted to do, so I'm kind of happy. I almost gave up on that dream of winning one. I wanted to focus on singles, but I am happy that I gave it that shot.
TV: How are you preparing for the Olympics?
CG: I'm really excited. I'm really just trying to make sure I enjoy the experience. Obviously I want to win, but also don't be too tunnel vision where I don't take in the things that are happening around me. So I'm super excited to experience the village and experience all the athletes and everything like that.
TV: In tennis, you have so many big events happening constantly. That must be so difficult because you're constantly training for this huge main event. What are some of the things that you do to keep yourself in check and make sure that you're mentally well and physically well?
CG: I usually try to practice in the morning so I have the afternoons to tour the city. Even if it's just walking outside for an hour or going outside to read the book. When you practice, you're so tired, you don't want to do anything, it’s very easy to just sit in the room all day and chill. And that's just life in general, not even if you're not an athlete, but if you get too much into that. Yesterday I did that and it's fine, but you don't want to do it consistently where I found that I would be going to the cities and I would not actually know how to describe to people what I did or what my favorite parks were. So I do try to make sure I at least dedicate a couple days or a couple hours to just doing something in the city.
TV:Anime is part of this pre-competition routine too, right?
CG: I do watch anime either before or after my matches or during the week or it just reminds me of childhood and it calms me. And there's so much tension when you're at these tournaments because it's just with anything, any sport. So sometimes people have different things that relax them and I gravitate towards anime or music or reading. Those are usually the three things I'll probably rotate between before matches.
TV: What are you listening to right now?
CG: I've been listening to a lot of Kaytranada. He released a new album, called “Timeless.” I also like Frank Ocean, so I'll listen to him too.
