As the WTA Finals continue this week in Indian Wells as a capstone of the year in women’s tennis, my thoughts have drifted to an absent player who had also seemed on track to be one of the best stories of 2026, until her momentum was brutally halted by one bad bounce in Paris.
Hailey Baptiste had been one of the revelations of the season, going from outside the Top 60 to inside the Top 30 within a few months in early 2026. She’d made semifinals at WTA 500 Abu Dhabi, quarterfinals at ATP-WTA 1000 Miami, and defeated then-No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in a saving-six-match-points thriller to reach the semifinals of ATP-WTA 1000 Madrid.
After that career-best win, Bounces readers may recall an interview here with her childhood friend-turned-coach, Will Woodall.
Baptiste kept rolling, winning a nailbiter over 2021 French Open champion Barbora Krejcikova in the first round at Roland Garros.
And then, as fast as she’d been rising, it all crashed down even more suddenly: she landed badly after a shot in the first set of her second-round match and suffered severe knee injuries: a torn ACL and meniscus damage.
After surgery in New York by Dr. Riley J. Williams III, Baptiste has been rehabilitating in our shared hometown of Washington D.C. in the months since, building back slowly and steadily while surrounded by a close circle, including Woodall and another childhood friend-turned-coach in Franklin Tiafoe.
To learn more about Baptiste and her progress, and how she and her team are managing this drastic trajectory switch, I met up with Woodall for another interview on a recent drizzly fall morning in D.C.
We discussed managing the physical and emotional sides of the injury, personal growth that can only happen away from the court, and how they chose their targeted date for Baptiste’s return to tour.
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