March 29, 2024

Open Court

MORE TENNIS THAN YOU'LL EVER NEED

Bouchard has a new trainer

Our little birdie in Oeiras, Portugal, where both Genie Bouchard and Milos Raonic will compete next week, tells us that Bouchard will officially debut a new strength and conditioning coach.

(The little bird was confirmed by the pic above, by Gaspar lança for ténis-portugal.com).

And he’s not just some dude; he’s a guy with a pretty impressive resumé: Scott Byrnes.

The Australian Byrnes worked most notably with Ana Ivanovic, in two separate stints. The first was from 2006 to 2009 – including the period when she won the French Open and rose to No. 1 in the world.

He was back with her in the middle of 2011, after she’d had a brief stint with a fellow Serb, Marija Lojanica, who seemed like a stern chaperone/guru type. That was an interesting era.

Phase 2 with Byrnes came after Wimbledon 2011, about the time she hired Nigel Sears as her coach and her romance with golfer Adam Scott heated up for a second time.

Byrnes had been working with Victoria Azarenka, and dumped her to go back to Ivanovic-land.

But by December, they were done again. Soon, Ivanovic was working with Tina Maio, an Australian osteopath who worked with, among others, Adam Scott.

So Byrnes is no stranger to girl drama 🙂

Bouchard is starting the clay-court season healthy, it appears. But with the amount of tennis she’s planning to play during the period leading up to the French Open, it’s a great time to finally get someone on board.

It’s a subject that been talked about since the beginning of the season, but seemingly only now coming to fruition.

Hopefully it’s a permanent fixture on the road because, with the relatively little traveling coach Nick Saviano does, there have been a few different hitting partners on the scene – no constant presence she can rely on as she navigates the shark-infested waters.

Byrnes has also worked with Vera Zvonareva. That was both  before Azarenka and Ivanovic Part II; he was with her for the best season of her career in 2010. And then, afterwards (in 2012, when she had a tough time).

Here he is, with Ivanovic.

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