Fitness coach Jason Stacy has admitted that Aryna Sabalenka was scared if she could play tennis again after COVID-19.
The revelation was revealed in an interview on The Line with Dr. Kristen Holmes, where Stacy described his evolution with Sabalenka since their collaboration started.
It has been a successful collaboration where Sabalenka has been world number one as well as winning four Grand Slam titles.
However, there were times where Sabalenka doubted herself and one of those times was after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stacy recalled Sabalenka’s greatest fear which was learning if she can remember how to play tennis again, “I realised from the start that she’s very, very… not trusting, very closed off,” Stacy was quoted by the Tennis365 website as saying.
“Part of it’s her personality, part of it’s the culture she was raised in, where you don’t trust anybody, you don’t speak about your goals, you don’t talk about things because if you talk about something, it’s gonna get taken away from you. If you build something, you’re gonna lose it.
“So this is the mentality you’re grown with, you’re raised with, some if it’s culture, some of it’s how she was raised, some of it’s her own personality. But she has this, even to this day, that’s one of her biggest fears of just losing everything.
“After Covid, where we first went back to the US Open, there was this moment where she just was like, she was genuinely terrified that she was gonna not know how to play tennis ever again. Like, she was done.
“Imagine that, you’re like, ‘What, you’re telling us this now.’ But you can see, it’s a real thing inside of her. And she’s obviously worked through that and managed it, but there’s still this part of her. So the biggest obstacle really was her understanding that for us to progress, for her to grow and to mature and to become what she wants to become — she has to open up a little bit. Even if it’s just a tiny little crack. Open that door just a tiny bit, be a little bit more vulnerable.
“And it wasn’t even coachable, she’ll do whatever we say. But it was just her allowing herself to face those deeper fears that we all have.”
Luckily Sabalenka has worked through those fears and is now the best player in the world as she aims to win a fifth Grand Slam title at next year’s Australian Open.
