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By Chris Oddo | @TheFanChild | Wednesday January 6, 2020

 
Leylah Fernandez

Leyhlah Fernandez hopes that her breakout 2020 season was just the tip of the iceberg. The Canadian has big goals for 2021.

Photo Source: Abierto Mexicana

It’s 2021—time for dreaming big. Canada’s Leylah Fernandez, at 18, is coming off a three-month off-season with lofty goals and a grounded mentality. Part dreamer, part pragmatist, Fernandez believes that she can become one of the games’ top players in the years to come. Maybe even this year.

Tennis Express

Though shy about giving details on improvements to her game, Fernandez makes no secret about her desire to make a stunning rise of the rankings to dwarf the significant improvements she made in 2020.

"It's a little private I don't want to give too much details, but we did have a team meeting, we did talk about the positives that I had [in 2020] and also the negatives, and we were trying to figure a plan to work on the negative and also be working on the positive to be able to get into the Top 10, this year,” the confident Canadian told reporters in a virtual press conference after her 6-4 6-2 win over Italy’s Jasmine Paolini on Tuesday in Abu Dhabi.


Coming off a season that saw her make her Top 100 debut and reach her first WTA final at Acapulco, Fernandez is taking a lot of confidence from the strides she made. The 2019 Roland Garros’ Girls Singles champion also earned her first Grand Slam main draw victory at the US Open and went on to reach the third round at Roland-Garros, where she lost her final match of the season to Petra Kvitova.

It was a loss that left Fernandez, the first Canadian woman to win a junior Slam title since Eugenie Bouchard in 2012, disappointed in her ability to keep her typically tidy game error-free. She is determined to take such losses and grow from them.

“Next time that we play against each other or next time that I play a top player like her in a Grand Slam, it will definitely be different,” she said after the loss. “I'll be playing a lot better, making less mistakes, being more of let's say a professional and follow my coach's game plan.”

Fernandez’s calling card is her professional approach. Never mind that she’s more than 20 months from her twentieth birthday, this is a woman that is serious about her craft. This is not a wide-eyed teenager who is wowed by the professional game or sidetracked by the temptation of playing to a growing social media following. Fernandez is already more professional that some WTA players much older than her and it is this quality that she’ll rely on to help her get to her goals.

"I think that this season I've matured a lot, from last season, I've learned a lot from the professionals, from the Top 10 and I'm trying to be more like them and to kind of improve my game in that way, so that's why my goal is to be Top 10 at the end of the season so that can achieve my dreams of winning some Grand Slams, be No.1 in the world, and I think that would be a big step for me,” she said. “It would obviously be hard but I think this will be a good challenge to accept."

Fernandez, who is slightly built at 5’4”, plays a calculated, incremental game based on consistency, fleet-feet and a willingness to be aggressive. Though relatively small compared to most of her peers on the tour, she’s clever enough and hits a big enough ball to play a dominant role against many opponents.

In 2021, she has high expectations for her progress—and her ranking. Though she’s wisely unwilling to talk about tactics or specific elements of her game that she wishes to improve, she’s more than eager to set her ranking goal outrageously high. Currently at 88 in the world, Fernandez must know that reaching the Top 10 by the end of the season is a bit far-fetched.

But she doesn’t seem to mind making it public, and tells reporters she’ll relish the pressure that comes with it.

"I think that's good for me,” she said of the pressure. “Obviously there will be a bit of pressure, but you know pressure is a privilege. If you don't have pressure then that means I'm doing something wrong. I'm loving that I have that pressure, I'm loving that there's something to achieve and the challenge won't be easy, so it will be an interesting year, and we will see how it goes at the end."

 

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