Coco Gauff’s rise was built on a family decision that cost almost everything in the short term. Candi Gauff and Corey Gauff moved from Atlanta to Delray Beach, Florida, and, for a period, turned a two-income household into a no-income household to support their daughter’s tennis development.
That is why readers are looking at the story now. Gauff, 22, has been revisiting the role her parents played behind the scenes, and her account makes the sacrifice impossible to miss: Corey Gauff, who played college basketball at Georgia State University and later worked as a healthcare executive, became her head coach during her early development, while Candi Gauff, a former star heptathlete and gymnast at Florida State University, handled homeschooling and the rest of life away from tennis. Together, they built a system around one child’s training and kept the family moving with purpose.
The details matter because the sacrifice was not only financial. Gauff has two younger brothers, Codey and Cameron, and she said the family lived with her grandparents in their house after moving from Georgia. As a child, she did not grasp what that meant. She remembers it as a move that felt exciting, a chance to live in Florida and be around cousins, not a calculation about money. Only later did the scale land: the family had gone from steady income to none at all while chasing her tennis future.
Corey Gauff’s role was technical and direct. He took over the work of shaping her game, while Candi Gauff kept school and daily structure in place. That split gave Coco Gauff a training environment that was unusually organized for a young player, but it also meant the parents were all in, with no backup plan if the gamble had not paid off. The family’s story is not just that they supported her. It is that they rearranged every part of life around the hope that her talent would justify the cost.
What remains unresolved is not whether the sacrifice happened, but how much it changed the player she became. Gauff’s reflection shows the emotional distance between a child who saw a move as fun and an adult who now understands it as a family bet measured in income, stability and years of effort.
