Marta Kostyuk lost this morning in the round of 16 of the WTA 1000 in Beijing, but this defeat will not hurt like the others. In an interview with the WTA, the Ukrainian celebrates her new alliance with Sandra Zaniewska, the coach who has led her to take a step forward.
Happy with his new coach
“Usually when I had this type of behavior with other coaches, no one, not even for a second, accepted it or tried to understand why I felt that way, they didn’t even try to have a conversation with me. They just left me alone. But she did, it was there that I realized that she was in front of a coach of another level, something she had not seen before.”
More women on the benches
“I am a person who talks a lot, for me it has always been difficult to have male coaches because, when it comes to working, the truth is that most of them don’t talk. This makes it difficult to express what you feel and adapt. If I was trained by my mother for most of my life, it was because she was a woman. “I’m very happy right now, I really hope that examples like mine with Sandra bring more female coaches to the circuit, that girls trust women more.”
Grow beyond results
“Honestly, if I look at the results of this trip, they are a disaster. But there is another side that people don’t see, a side that I am very proud of myself. Every day is a struggle, but I am happy to share that struggle with Sandra by my side. She always tells me: ‘Do you remember that at the beginning of everything if something happened you couldn’t play? Now you laugh about it.’ It’s all about perspective. It is very nice to know these types of things, to be aware of them because it makes you value yourself more and feel more proud of yourself.”
So much demand led him to depression
“My mental state since I was 15 has been this. Even in matches where I faced a very favorite player, an opponent who was far above me, I still expected to put up a good fight and win. Now I’m trying not to be like that, but it’s not easy to keep expectations in check.”
Sandra Zaniewska, key to her happiness
“Now I feel very relaxed because I don’t have to pretend anything, I’m not even afraid of not knowing how to tell him something because I don’t know what his reaction will be like. I’m a very emotional person, so a lot of coaches in the past have tried to control this, like you can’t throw a racket or something. Sandra simply lets me be as I am and who I am, it helps me feel much freer.”
A real change of mentality
“This trip is really helping me take losses differently. I think that, in a way, every defeat is a victory, you have to look at it that way. There is nothing you can change about losing, what you can change is the way you see it: being positive or negative. The positive thing is that you are aware and honest with yourself and with your coach about what you have to do. On the contrary, you can also sit and destroy yourself, telling yourself all the time what you did wrong. You cannot build with a foundation like that, you cannot grow, since this way you will collapse every time you have two consecutive defeats.”
2023-10-04 19:00:31
#Marta #Kostyuk #talks #coach #Sandra #Zaniewska
