INDIAN WELLS – Emma Navarro speaks slowly and softly with a lilt. Perhaps it’s those Charleston roots, and her rapid rise in pro tennis has been understated so far, too.
For now, she has one top 10 victory and has yet to make a deep run at a major. Though she secured her first WTA Tour title in January in Tasmania, she has done most of her winning at lower levels with five ITF singles titles in 2023.
But Navarro’s ranking and flowing game are improving at a remarkable clip. She has been a full-time professional for less than two years and is already up to No. 23 in the world, high enough to be seeded for the first time at the BNP Paribas Open.
At age 22, she is the fourth youngest player in the top 25 after Coco Gauff, Zheng Qinwen and No. 1 Iga Swiatek. She is also the fourth ranked American behind Gauff, Jessica Pegula and Madison Keys.
Like Pegula, whose family owns the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, Navarro comes from an affluent background. She was born in New York City and grew up in Charleston, moving south with her family at age 3. Her father Benjamin Navarro is a billionaire businessman and philanthropist who is the founder and chief executive of Sherman Financial Group, which owns Credit One Bank. He is also an increasingly big player in tennis with Beemok Capital, his family office, acquiring the Charleston Open in 2018 and the Cincinnati Open in 2022.
Emma started playing the game early with her father and siblings, and sports are an important part of the Navarros’ past and present. Ben’s father Frank was a college football player who was head football coach at my alma mater Williams College, Wabash College, Princeton University and Columbia University and was the model for the coach in Norman Rockwell’s painting “The Recruit”. He was interviewed about it for the Norman Rockwell Museum:
But Emma is now the most successful athlete in the family: a tennis prodigy who was one of the world’s best juniors and won the N.C.A.A. singles title as a freshman at the University of Virginia before becoming a full-time professional after her sophomore year in 2022.
Working closely with her longtime coach Peter Ayers, who was a standout player at Duke University in the 1990s, Navarro has climbed steadily from No. 233 in 2021 to 143 in 2022 to 38 in 2023 to the brink of the top 20 early in 2024.
That is a lot harder to achieve than she has made it look with her smooth baseline game and unruffled competitive demeanor (more on that below). A natural counterpuncher who has become quicker and more powerful in her two years on the circuit, she is a player and talent to watch no doubt.
I spent time with Navarro last week at the San Diego Open: interviewing her at length, listening to her news conferences and sitting in on her public forum about mental health with Fadel Zeidan, an associate professor at UC San Diego.
Here are excerpts from those conversations, which have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity:
On her zenitude and how she prepares for competition:
“That chillness definitely comes naturally to me. I’ve always been like that. My dad says I get it from my mom, who is the same way, and my uncles always called her “ice woman” so when I was younger they called me “ice girl”. On the court, it’s been harder for me to kind of hype myself up in the past more than calm myself down. I’ve been too relaxed and too chill, which is probably something not a lot of other players would say, so it’s definitely something that’s unique to me for sure. So, in those tough moments, it’s been a real challenge for me to just be really intense with how I’m playing and moving and the shots I’m taking on. It’s more natural for me to kind of step back and see what the other player is going to do and kind of react. So, that is definitely something I’ve been focusing on since I joined the tour and something I work on every single match, and something I always feel I can get better at. But I feel I have come a long way with that, and that has contributed to some of the success I’ve had.”
On whether she watched a lot of tennis growing up:
“No, I started watching tennis like last year, which is pretty crazy. My coach was like, ‘Yeah, you need to start, so try to watch like an hour a week.’ So now I’ve become a little bit of a tennis nerd. I watch whenever I can, but growing up, I wasn’t that interested. I just wanted to play.”
On how much her family legacy in sports was a factor in becoming a pro athlete:
“Maybe more than I know actually (LAUGHS). From a young age, I don’t think my parents saw me as the type to be sitting in an office when I’m 22 years old. I think they just saw I loved to be outside and loved to be active and couldn’t really sit still. I did well in school, but it definitely wasn’t my favorite place to be. I wanted to be outside playing sports. I think they saw that in me before I saw it in myself. So, I think that was the main reason I was put on this path at a young age, and then I just really leaned into it as I got older.”
On her grandfather Frank’s influence (he died in 2021 at age 91):
“He was a big part of my life. He was a really tough guy. I would say he had this larger-than-life sort of personality, and it was really cool to have that figure in my life. It was very inspiring. It felt like nothing could stand in his way, and he was going to do things his way no matter what. I definitely learned a lot of lessons from him.”
On the impact on her career of growing up as a child of privilege:
“It’s not something that I think about. It was never a topic when I was younger. My dad had had success in business but growing up, I had no idea. I don’t want to say we didn’t live a life of privilege, because I know there's tons of kids that would kill to be in the position I was in as a kid. But our thing was we would spend our time going on family walks for three or four hours, or we would bike as a family all around town for the entire day. There was just never any emphasis placed on that, and I think it was really important for my dad and both my parents to teach us how to live our lives and how to be good people, and how to live with certain morals and pillars and that kind of thing. And so that was the focus growing up.”
On why she chose tennis with all the options she had available:
“My dad just kind of fell in love with tennis, and it was a family sport we could all play together. I have some really fond memories of going and playing with my dad and my brothers and eventually my sister together on weekends. That’s just kind of how it started, a wholesome weekend activity we could do together. Both my parents place a lot of importance on being active and getting outside and health. So, they tried to make that a top priority for us as kids growing up. From there, my dad and eventually coaches maybe saw something in me that I could make a career out of this. I definitely pushed back a little bit in my late teens, thinking maybe this is not what I want to do, because I didn’t choose it as a kid. I was kind of just placed on this path and maybe that was just the rebellious teenager in me. I kept playing through it. I was just a little bit more angry.”
On whether equipment was broken:
“Actually, I broke my first racket a few weeks ago. And not on the court. The racket didn’t hit the ground. It was on my shoe. I wasn’t trying to break it. It was a tiny crack.”
On whether that should count:
“OK, let’s keep it at zero rackets broken (LAUGHS)”
On playing college tennis at UVA:
“It was an extremely necessary step for me, just to mature I guess and to take the steps I needed to take to be able to be 100% committed to professional tennis. College tennis is really tough. It's difficult balancing tennis, school, and social life, and you're on a team so you're not the most important person in the room. You have many other girls that play an equal part, and you're playing for something that's bigger than yourself. You're playing for your teammates and your coaches and your university. And I think in tennis a lot of players have sort of this mindset that they're the most important thing ever and in college tennis you don't have that, because you're not.”
On how she overcame her doubts about turning pro:
“When I went to college, I still wasn’t sure. I was maybe still going to go for all four years, see what happened at school, and after two years it felt like I had gotten what I wanted out of school, and I felt like I had put a ton of work into tennis and I wanted to completely see it through. I felt like the time was now to do it, and if I had waited longer I felt that maybe an opportunity would pass me by a little bit. Three or four months after I left school was when I first and finally felt 100 percent committed, like this is where I want to be, this is where I’m supposed to be, and I’m 100 percent in, whatever it takes. But it took me three or four months. At first, I was like, ‘Maybe I made a bad decision. I kind of miss being a normal 21-year-old a little bit.’ But I got past that and after that, it was, let’s do it!”
On the biggest challenge she has faced since committing to the tour:
“The biggest general challenge is just feeling like I am not good enough, and I don’t belong at this level. So, that’s something I am still working on: believing that I can play good enough to be here and not being scared of winning a certain match because then this is what is expected of me in the future, the sense that if I beat this player then I must beat this other player, too. Just getting past that fear of expectations, I think has been a big challenge for me. I’m not even really worried about the rest of the world’s expectations. It’s more internal.”
On being a perfectionist in a sport where perfection is all but impossible:
“It’s really tough, because I would say there’s probably never a day where I come off the practice or match court, and I feel like I was perfect, and I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. But part of what keeps me going is the possibility. I come to the court every day, and there’s something inside of me that says maybe today is the day that I will be 100 percent perfect. And I’ve been playing for 19 years and it hasn’t happened, but maybe tomorrow is the day.”
“Intentionality is probably my dad’s favorite word. It’s how my siblings and I were raised: you do everything with purpose and intentionality and if not, it’s not worth doing. I definitely take that mentality with me on the court. It’s just kind of a pillar we were raised with, and yes I expect myself to do everything perfectly and obviously that doesn’t happen, but I would like it to happen. It takes a lot of focus on the court to not leave any stone unturned so if there’s anything I can be doing to put myself in the best position I possibly can be in every point, that’s what I want to do. The ball is not going to feel the best every day, and I’m not going to be playing the best every day, but if I can take some confidence with that mindset then that’s something I can use to just fuel myself forward.”
On her best shot:
“My backhand is maybe more my steady shot. My forehand is maybe a bit more of a rebel child at times, but I would say my backhand.”
On recent improvements in her game:
“Playing more aggressively has been a really big thing for me, and that’s kind of all-encompassing. It includes the way I get into position to take shots on and the shots that I do hit.”
On the challenge of adding power:
“That was never really a specific focus of ours, hitting the ball harder, but it kind of came with improving how I move, improving how I get into position, improving the way I use my legs and my hips through the ball. The kinetic chain, and so it came with that and cleaning up some technique stuff to allow me to push back against a lot of big balls coming my way. It was never a specific focus but by improving all these other things the result has been more power and a bigger ball.”
On her improved court coverage and quickness:
“That's been a big focus for sure. A lot of work in the gym. Just learning how to use my body in a more explosive way, and then we added doing footwork with no ball, and I think that's helped a lot, just to be able to feel certain movements where you don't have the pressure or that added factor of hitting the ball. I used to do a ton of conditioning, long sort of endurance type stuff, and I do a little bit of that now, but much less. Especially in the women's game, so many points are under three or four shots. I don't know the stats, but it's really low. So, a big focus has been being super strong at the beginning of points. That endurance stuff is not as relevant anymore as it was when I was younger. It’s just being really explosive now. My trainer and I focus a lot on building myself as an athlete and not just a tennis player. So I’m doing footwork or speed work that a football player might do. It just allows me to be able to handle physically anything that's thrown at me because in a match, there's so much that's so unpredictable.”
On her mental approach to the circuit:
“I’ve been with my coach for seven, almost eight years now, and he does a really good job just keeping things in perspective and keeping that super narrow focus. A year ago, when I was playing 60Ks we weren't looking ahead, to oh I should be on the WTA Tour playing 1000s. We were just happy to be where we were and content with playing at this certain level. It's always been a super methodical progression of improving myself as a player and improving my mental game, just having that contentment with ‘I'm good where I'm at, as long as we continue to push forward with improving myself and not being afraid to maybe take a couple steps back in order to go forwards.’ It just keeps everything in perspective. I'm not chasing some result, or some ranking that I'm not at right now. I’m in the moment.”
On whether she now truly thinks she belongs among the elite:
“It’s always a work in progress believing every day that I’m playing good enough to have a certain result. But yeah, I feel definitely more like I belong.”
CC
P.S. My best-selling biography THE MASTER on Federer and his rivals has been revised and re-released this year. You can find it here, and I just gave a copy to Emma Navarro whose straight-arm forehand reminds me just a little bit of a certain forehand from Switzerland.
P.P.S. I would be delighted to sign copies of THE MASTER in Indian Wells for those who can find me on site.
"On recent improvements to her game"
'. . . Hitting the ball harder kind of came with improving how I move, improving how I get into position.
'. . . The kinetic position'
'. . . learning how to use my body in a more explosive way'
'. . . and then we added the footwork'
'. . . I focus a lot on building myself as an athlete and not just a tennis player/
'. . . So I'm doing the footwork or speed work that a football player might do'
Amazing insights from a 22 year who actually understands that, in tennis, what happens from the waist down is equally important - if not more so - as to what your mind and body does from the waist up.
Peter Ayers sounds like a cross between the American equivalent of Pierre Paganini with his emphasis on physical strength, endurance and preparation and Martina Hingis and her famous footwork drills.
Ms. Navarro could go far.
Wow, somehow I have missed her. I watched some of her highlights form San Diego. She looks really impressive. Thanks for brining her to my attention, Chris. Great to have another young American in the mix.