Danielle Collins: ‘I’m proud of how I was able to work my way to the top. To really, truly earn it’

IIn the fall of 2012, when she was 18 and a freshman at the University of Florida, Danielle Collins joined a tennis team that had just won an NCAA championship and was filled with the highest caliber of students. Unfortunately, she wasn’t one of them. During her year in Gainesville, Collins was unable to make the lineup.

Collins and I first spoke by phone in May, shortly after her back-to-back victories on the hard courts of Miami and the green clays of Charleston. She is currently No. 11 in the world and plans to retire at the end of this season in 2024, after eight years on tour and nearly $9 million in prize money. There is an eerie joy in the fact that of her four WTA singles titles, half have come in quick succession in this latter part of her career, as if the conviction in what she wants for her life off the court—time, freedom, the chance to start a family—has somehow unlocked a sense of liberated clarity. She is retiring, but first she is going to win. In an age when players retire when their bodies and years on the court are well past their physical peak, Collins is doing something unusual. She is getting off the court while she still can.

“People always ask me about my freshman year and say, ‘How is that possible? How come you weren’t even in the lineup?’ And I’m like, well, it wasn’t that crazy,” Collins explained. “At that point, I wasn’t anywhere near the level that I wanted to be. Being in that environment — where they had just won the national championship — forced me to become a better player and figure out what I needed to develop. It was a very humbling experience.”

Collins eventually transferred to the University of Virginia for her sophomore year. The coaching staff met her where she was and helped shape her game. Eventually, Collins found her niche. In 2014, she won the NCAA singles title—Virginia’s first—and two years later, she won it a second time before entering the paying ranks. Little did anyone know that this would be the beginning 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 of how I started as a student-athlete to how I was able to work my way to the top, to earn it. To really, really earn it. I know what the sacrifice and the sweat and the tears mean. I didn’t have most of my success until my late 20s and now in my early 30s. That seems unorthodox in the tennis industry.”

A image Collins’s image of that NCAA victory—roaring, proud—now seems like a delta for the kind of player she’s become in the decade that followed. Collins isn’t shy. On the court, she’s brash, unapologetic, direct. Over the years, her response to frustration, whether from an opponent or the crowd, has yielded descriptions that, when used to describe women, somehow morph into a less than flattering portrait.

During a second-round match against Erica Andreeva at the Monterrey Open earlier this month, a crowd of people booed as Collins waited for Andreeva to serve. Collins eventually threw her hands up in visible annoyance as she made a ”What on earth?” complained to the noisemakers. She lost the match in three sets.

On Tuesday, Collins will face fellow American Caroline Dolehide in the first round of the US Open, kicking off the final Grand Slam tournament of her career. With the end in sight, I ask if there was a moment when she could look back and point to where she knew she had made it.

“The quarterfinals against Venus Williams at the Miami Open, my home tournament,” Collins said. “It was my breakthrough year, 2018, and it was just surreal. I remember watching Venus and Serena [Williams] in the locker room and talking to them, and I think I had tears in my eyes. And then going out on the field to play against Venus in a huge stadium, with my friends and family there, was such an amazing experience.”

Collins’ father played competitively when she was growing up, and as a three-year-old she would tag along with him, running around the schoolyard while he was on the field. When she wanted to play herself, her parents scraped together the money to give her lessons. In the first tournament she ever played, she didn’t know how to keep score. (“I lost that game,” she recalled.)

“It was special to be able to play junior tennis with my parents,” Collins said. “I know how hard it was to afford this sport, coming from a lower-middle-class family. My mom was a kindergarten teacher and my dad was a gardener, and they saved all the money they earned to be able to take me to those tournaments on the weekends.”

Collins looked to the Williams sisters and Jennifer Capriati and Anna Kournikova – other players from more modest backgrounds – to see what they were doing and what her life in tennis might look like. “When I saw these women playing 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 try and pursue my dreams of one day being in their shoes. That’s how it started for me.”

At her last Wimbledon in July, where she reached the second week before bowing out in the last 16 to eventual champion Barbora Krejčíková, Matthew McConaughey tweeted about Collins’ performance, calling her one of “the best sports/life stories of 2024.” I asked her if she’d seen it. (She had.) Does she know him personally? (She doesn’t.) She was flattered nonetheless. “It’s crazy to think that this person whose movies we’ve all seen 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 follows on seamlessly from her breakthrough season at Virginia.

“I think it’s really rewarding to be able to finish my career by winning a couple of tournaments this year,” she said. “One of my biggest career goals was to be an Olympian and I’ve achieved that. It’s usually the stories of the young athletes who 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 get there, but playing in the Olympics is one of the best memories on the court that I’ll have for the rest of my life.”

Collins has not entirely ruled out the possibility that tennis might take another form later on – not as a player, but perhaps in some other way.

“The most important thing for me now is to settle in at home and have some time to relax and build my family,” she said. “But I certainly wouldn’t be against helping athletes who are aiming for a higher position. Honestly, if I could work with any tennis player at any level, my favorite people to be on court with are beginners. I’m a very patient person, surprisingly. You wouldn’t think that if you watch me play professional tennis, but I’m actually very good at coaching that beginner phase. It’ll be interesting to see what I end up doing, but in the short term it’s just enjoying tennis for what it is rather than as a profession.”