In the fall of 2012, when she was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Florida, Danielle Collins joined a tennis team fresh off an NCAA championship and filled with collegiate players of the highest caliber. Unfortunately, she wasn’t one of them. During her year in Gainesville, Collins wasn’t able to crack the lineup.
Collins and I first spoke by phone in May, on the heels of her back-to-back victories on the hard courts of Miami and the green clay in Charleston. She is the current world No 11 and, come the end of this 2024 season, after eight years on tour and nearly $9m in prize money, plans to retire at 30. There is an uncanny delight in the fact that of her four WTA singles titles, half were won in quick succession in this final stretch of her career, as though somehow the conviction in what she wants for her life off-court – time, freedom, the chance to start a family – has unlocked a sense of liberated clairvoyance. She is going to retire, but first, she is going to win. In an era of players calling it quits when their bodies and years on courts have extended and bended long past their physical prime, Collins is doing an unusual thing. She’s leaving the court while the getting’s good.
“People always ask about my freshman year and say, ‘How is that possible? How is it that you weren’t even playing in the lineup?’ And I’m like, well, it actually wasn’t that crazy,” Collins explained. “At that time, I wasn’t nearly at the level that I wanted. Being in that environment – where they’d just won the national championship – pushed me to be a better player and to figure out what I needed to develop. It was a very humbling experience.”
Collins ended up transferring to the University of Virginia for her sophomore year. The coaching staff met her where she was and helped craft her game. Eventually, Collins found her stride. In 2014, she won the NCAA singles title – Virginia’s first – and two years later, she won it for a second time before entering the paying ranks. No one then could have imagined it would be the start of a professional journey that would see her reach a grand slam singles final and peak at No 7 in the WTA rankings.
“That’s probably one of the things I’m most proud of in my career,” she said. “The trajectory from how I started as a collegiate athlete, to how I was able to work my way to the top, to earn it. To really, truly earn it. I know what the sacrifice and sweat and tears mean. I didn’t have most of my success until later in my twenties and now early thirties. That seems to be unorthodox in the tennis industry.”
An image of Collins from that NCAA win – roaring, proud – now appears like a delta for the kind of player she’s become in the ensuing decade. Collins isn’t shy. On court, she’s bold, unabashed, direct. Over the years, her response to frustrations, whether from an opponent or the crowd, have earned descriptors that when used to describe women, somehow transmute into a less flattering portrait.
During a second-round match against Erica Andreeva at the Monterrey Open earlier this month, a group in the crowd heckled while Collins waited for Andreeva to serve. Collins finally threw her hands up, visibly exasperated, as she fired off a ”What in the world?” lament at the noisemakers. She lost the match in three sets.
On Tuesday, Collins will meet fellow American Caroline Dolehide in the first round of the US Open, for the start of the final grand slam tournament of her career. With the ending in sight, I ask if there was a moment she could look back and point to where she knew she’d made it.
“The quarter-finals against Venus Williams at the Miami Open, my home tournament,” said Collins. “It was my breakthrough year, 2018, and it was just surreal. I remember seeing Venus and Serena [Williams] in the locker room and talking to them, and I think I had tears in my eyes. And then to go out on court playing against Venus in a huge stadium, with my friends and family there, was such an amazing experience.”
Collins’ dad played league matches when she was growing up, and as a three-year-old she went with him and ran around the playground while he was on court. Once she wanted to play herself, her parents scraped together what they could to get her lessons. In the first tournament she ever competed, she didn’t know how to keep score. (“I lost that match,” she recalled.)
“Being able to go through juniors tennis with my parents was special,” said Collins. “I know how difficult it was coming from a lower middle-class family to afford this sport. My mom was a preschool teacher and my dad was a landscaper and they saved up all the money they earned to be able to take me to those tournaments on the weekends.”
Collins watched the Williams sisters and Jennifer Capriati and Anna Kournikova – other players from more humble beginnings – to see what they were doing and what her life in tennis might look like. “Seeing these women play on the biggest stages in the world, I thought it was so cool. I felt like if those athletes could do it, maybe I could give it a try and go after my dreams of being in their shoes one day. That’s how it started for me.”
During her final Wimbledon in July, where she reached the second week before bowing to eventual champion Barbora Krejčíková in the last 16, Matthew McConaughey tweeted about Collins’ performance, calling her one of “the great sport/life stories of 2024”. I asked her if she’d seen it. (She had.) Does she know him personally? (She does not.) She was flattered nonetheless. “It’s crazy to think this person whose movies we’ve all watched had some nice things to say about my tennis. It really meant a lot.” Dazed and Confused came out a few months before Collins was born, though the McConaissance aligns squarely with her breakout season at Virginia.
“I do think it’s super rewarding that I can finish out my career having won some tournaments this year,” she said. “One of my biggest career goals was to become an Olympian and I was able to make that happen. It’s usually the stories of the young athletes that get to the top, but with us older veterans, it’s not something people think about as much. It took me a little bit longer to be able to achieve it, but playing the Olympics are some of the best memories on court that I’ll have for the rest of my life.”
Collins hasn’t completely ruled out the possibility of tennis taking on another iteration later in life – not as a player, but perhaps as something else.
“The biggest thing for me now is settling into life at home and having some time to just relax and also build my family,” she said. “But I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to helping athletes that are aspiring to work their way up. Honestly, if I could work with any level of a tennis player, my favorite people to get out on court with are beginners. I am a very patient person, surprisingly. You wouldn’t know that watching me play professional tennis, but I’m actually great at coaching that beginner stage. It’ll be interesting to see what I end up doing, but in the short term, it’ll just be enjoying tennis for what it is versus as a profession.”
