When a 20-year-old Eugenie Bouchard reached the Wimbledon final in 2014, she was hailed as the new star of women’s tennis. A prosperous and lucrative career on and off the court was expected, with the business media company SportsPro including the Canadian on a top-20 list of sport’s most marketable athletes alongside Cristiano Ronaldo, Usain Bolt and Alex Morgan.
Ten years later, Bouchard is ranked No524 in the world after playing only one third-tier tournament this season, at which a cheque of £1,400 was received for two wins. Instead of hitting tennis balls on the grass in preparation for Wimbledon, two weeks ago she was on the smaller hard courts of California for a Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) event.
While the racket sport of padel becomes increasingly popular across Europe, it is pickleball that is catching more attention in North America. Pickleball is played on a smaller, badminton-sized court with a hard paddle (the term for a racket) and a perforated plastic ball.
The court lines are similar to tennis, although there is an area around the net called “The Kitchen” — a non-volley zone in which serves are also not allowed to land. Points can only be scored by the player/team who is serving and PPA tour matches use a best-of-three games format, with each game won by the player/team who first gets to 11 points with a lead of two.
This is not the position that Bouchard imagined she would eventually find herself in after walking off Centre Court on July 5, 2014, as the runner-up to Petra Kvitova but it is hard to detect any disappointment as she reflects on her journey over the past decade. Indeed, as she speaks at length over a video call from the beachside city of San Clemente, I ponder whether I ever saw her looking as content as this on the tennis tour.
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Some of her happiness is fuelled by improvements in her pickleball skills. A PPA staff member tells me shortly before the interview that Bouchard has just beaten a “veteran of the game”. Already Bouchard has come a long way since she started playing pickleball in February, when a blooper-style video was cheekily shared by a viewer on social media showing a series of poor errors.
“I find it a totally different skill set,” Bouchard explains. “Of course I have athleticism and hand-eye coordination from tennis that helps me. But first of all the paddle is smaller and a tennis racket is longer. The first few times I played I’m literally missing the ball because I think I’m swinging a tennis racket.
“The strategy is so different. For 25 years I was taught that a short ball is bad but in pickleball the little dinks are what you want. Rewiring my brain like that has been the hardest part because I’m so instinctive when I play tennis. As soon as I get in a pickleball point, it goes back and forth really quickly, so the instincts kick in but they’re tennis instincts which mess me up. I have to think more when I play, which takes time, and it’s not a natural instinct yet. I’m still working on that.”
To be clear, Bouchard is an active tennis player who is not on the verge of retirement at the age of 30. A series of physical issues — most notably surgery on a shoulder in 2021 — has caused challenges in playing a full-time schedule because of her rankings decline but she plans to return somewhere on the American hard courts at the start of the next month.
The transition to pickleball came about during her failed qualifying attempt at last year’s US Open. Looking to build a higher profile with a big name from the world of tennis, the PPA approached Bouchard’s agent with a tempting offer — the financial sum is undisclosed — to play professional events.
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“It just seemed like a really unique opportunity and I love being a part of something that’s growing so quickly and is so popular right now,” Bouchard says. “Also there is challenging myself. I’ve done tennis for 25 years and I find it stimulating for my brain to try something new.
“I’m going to put tennis tournaments in where I can fit them in my schedule. Tennis is what I love and what I still want to keep doing. The pickleball schedule is the priority but I do want to insert those tennis tournaments.”
Bouchard still keeps a close eye on the various goings-on in the tennis world, both through a natural interest in the sport and a duty to the Tennis Channel as an occasional pundit throughout the year. Recently she took notice of a quote from the British No1 Jack Draper in which he said: “I quite enjoy being in front of the camera” during a photoshoot for Vogue Magazine. “If I had said this ten years ago I would have been crucified,” Bouchard said on social media last month.
This was a lighthearted comment with a laughing emoji attached but there is a serious side to what she says. Bouchard received fierce criticism for the many sponsorship contracts she signed, photographs she posed for, and glitzy A-list events she attended at the height of her fame. While Emma Raducanu still comes under some scrutiny for her off-court interests, there is generally more of an acceptance that lucrative deals and red carpet appearances are part of the business for a high-profile tennis player.
“Back in the day, I could train six hours during the day before later posting on social media about being at the movies and I would get hate,” Bouchard recalls. “It was like, well, social media isn’t an exact representation of my day.
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“It’s great that the world has changed over the past ten years and now not only is it acceptable to do off-court things, it’s actually encouraged. Back in the day, I felt like I was being shoved into a box, like you can’t do anything besides tennis. I was like, tennis has given me opportunities to explore the fashion world, TV and all these other things. Why would I say no? We’re talking about my life in its entirety here.
“I would get so much hate for doing anything other than tennis. It was a burden I would bear on my shoulders and it was really hard. At least it’s more accepted now. Not that I was the only pioneer to do these things but I feel like I made it a little bit more normal.”
After claiming a career-high world ranking of No5 ten years ago, Bouchard never again scaled those heights. 2014 was her best year by far, reaching the semi-finals of the Australian Open and French Open before falling one step short of the trophy at Wimbledon.
In 2015 she slipped on a cleaning substance on the floor of the trainer’s room at the US Open before her fourth-round match and suffered a serious concussion that forced her to withdraw from the tournament. She did not play again that calendar year and in 2018 won an out-of-court settlement from the United States Tennis Association. But her great regret before her career slide is that she ended her eight-year partnership with her coach Nick Saviano at the end of the 2014 season.
“There’s no blueprint on how to handle a huge life change like what I experienced in 2014,” Bouchard says. “There’s no way to actually really prepare for that. Not me and not the people around me.
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“Of course I look back and have small regrets. I would have not stopped working with my coach at the time. Looking back, I would have wanted to keep my coach for stability because I was already going through so much. Why change an important person in my team? I also think he was a great coach and would have helped me continue to improve.
“Also, I wouldn’t have taken things so personally and let the hate absorb into my brain. Brainwashing works and if you start hearing negative things about yourself over and over again, it’s hard not to believe it. I just wish I could have clocked that out more and not let it affect my confidence because it totally did affect how I thought about myself. It even affected how I played.”
It is five years ago this month that Bouchard was most recently ranked inside the top 100. She will not put a number on her target when she returns next month but is simply not ready to let go of a sport she first played at the age of five.
“I want to achieve whatever I can,” Bouchard says. “I’m not doing a full-time tennis schedule, so of course I need to understand that there will be limitations. I think I want to do as well as I can in each individual tournament and see where that goes. But I love tennis and it’s not something I want to give up yet at all.”
