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On Tennis

‘A Girl From the Middle of Nowhere’ Finds Her Place at the U.S. Open

Anastasija Sevastova defeated the defending champion Sloane Stephens at the U.S. Open on Tuesday. She will play Serena Williams in the semifinals on Thursday.Credit...Uli Seit for The New York Times

On a sunlit summer day in Latvia in 2014, Anastasija Sevastova and Ronald Schmidt, her new boyfriend and fellow tennis coach, were visiting her windswept home city, Liepaja.

They went to the beach, where Sevastova, only 24 but already retired as a tour-level player, had something important to share.

“She got very serious,” Schmidt said on Wednesday. “And she told me she wanted to try tennis again, to compete and see how far she could get.”

Four years later, the answer is the semifinals of the United States Open, where Sevastova will face Serena Williams under the lights and the microscope in a packed Arthur Ashe Stadium on Thursday night.

Williams’s now-familiar story is an irresistible against-great-odds tale of a father’s and a family’s quest to dominate a sport in which they had no initial foothold.

But Sevastova has quite a career arc of her own, and it is not just about her phenomenal comeback after nearly two years away from the tour.

“Anastasija’s story is kind of crazy, too,” Schmidt said.

Latvia has risen to prominence in tennis in the last decade with Ernests Gulbis breaking into the ATP top 10 of the men’s tour; Jelena Ostapenko winning the women’s singles title at the 2017 French Open and Sevastova breaking into the top 20 and repeatedly going deep at the U.S. Open.

But the small Baltic nation was still a tennis backwater when Sevastova learned the game on red clay in Liepaja, a city now best known as the hometown of the Knicks star Kristaps Porzingis.

No one in Sevastova’s family played tennis seriously.

“I was hopeless, hopeless, twice hopeless,” said her mother, Diana Golovanova, who raised Sevastova as a single parent.

Unlike Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena, Golovanova — a secondary-school English teacher — had no interest in creating a champion.

“No, never, I’m not the one who insists on anything,” she said in an interview in Liepaja earlier this year. “I’m just a crying type of mom. I was not like ‘Come on! You’ve got to make it,’ like Sharapova’s father or Jelena Dokic’s.”

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The inside of a tennis club in Liepaja, Latvia, where Sevastova learned to play.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

But Sevastova’s grandmother was interested in channeling Sevastova’s energy into sports. With her natural athleticism, she could have gravitated to basketball or soccer. But it was tennis because her grandmother had some friends who played and because the only club of significance in Liepaja was near Sevastova’s home, tucked into the dunes near the Baltic Sea to avoid the worst of the wind.

“Pure chance,” Golovanova said. “Some kids go to art school. It was tennis, because it was summer, close to the water and close to our house. So you just enroll your kid.”

As luck would also have it, Sevastova’s elderly first coach, Edgars Ernestons, was not a Soviet-era disciplinarian but a mentor who emphasized enjoying the process.

“A great coach,” Sevastova said. “It’s so important to show the kids this love of tennis, and that’s what we had, and so I loved it.”

The colder months would prove more complicated. There were no indoor tennis-dedicated facilities in Liepaja — only school gymnasiums with varnished wooden floors, where the multicolored lines used for various sports intersect like a Mondrian painting.

Sevastova played most of her winter tennis in the gymnasium in a secondary school where her mother was a teacher. It is also the same school where Ostapenko’s mother and primary coach, Jelena Jakovleva, attended school as a youngster.

“Until age 14, I practiced in the school gyms on the wood,” Sevastova said. “Riga has some good facilities with indoor clay and hard courts, but I was always in Liepaja. Indoors on wood is a different style of play because it was so fast, and there were lots of bad bounces.”

Initially, the cost of playing the game was inexpensive. “Like 10 euros per month,” Sevastova said. “And they assigned you a coach with 10 other people.”

But it soon became clear that Sevastova would need to leave home to progress. Gulbis, who was from an affluent family in Riga, was boarding at Niki Pilic’s tennis academy in Munich, where a teenage Novak Djokovic was also training.

Sevastova eventually followed the same path at age 14, returning regularly to Latvia to complete her schooling.

“Ernests was there; some other Latvian players were there,” Sevastova said. “Pilic was kind of the ‘in’ thing.”

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Sevastova took up tennis instead of another sport because the club, shown here, was near her home.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Golovanova went with her to Germany for her first tryout. She said that Pilic, a former French Open finalist, came on court when Sevastova was rallying with some of his coaches.

“He had never met her or heard anything about her,” Golovanova said. “She was just a girl from the middle of nowhere, and he says, ‘Top 50. Top 30 if she tries hard.’ I mean, how could he know that?”

The financial challenge was daunting. “It was just madly, crazily expensive,” said Golovonova, who remembered looking at the numbers and despairing. “But in the end, it was written in the stars and the money came in.”

She said they cobbled together the money for the academy through a combination of Latvian tennis federation funding, personal savings, friends’ donations and private Latvian sponsors.

As it turns out, Pilic’s prediction was conservative. Sevastova, seeded 19th at the U.S. Open, has become a fixture in the top 20 after reaching a career high of No. 15 last October.

Win the title in New York and she would break into the top 10. But that would require her to stop Williams, who has been playing like a champion on a mission as she chases her 24th major singles title and her first since she returned to the tour in March after giving birth to her daughter.

Williams, 36, and Sevastova, 28, have yet to play in singles. But Sevastova, whose game is full of slice and guile, is the kind of unconventional veteran player that has troubled Williams before in a U.S. Open semifinal (see Roberta Vinci’s mega-upset of Williams in 2015).

“Maybe we are going to watch this match,” said Schmidt, an Austrian who is now Sevastova’s coach as well as her boyfriend.

He wears an “I HEART Liepaja” cap during her matches, and not because anyone from the city tourism board is paying him.

“I bought it in a coffee shop,” he said. “I started last year with it, and now I’m wearing on every singles match. It’s superstitious.”

Sevastova has reserved her finest tennis for Flushing Meadows, reaching the quarterfinals in 2016 and 2017. This will be her first Grand Slam semifinal, and it comes after she defeated the defending champion Sloane Stephens in straight sets in intense heat in Arthur Ashe Stadium on Tuesday.

It should be cooler on Thursday night, but the occasion should still be a pressure cooker.

“Hopefully she can handle the moment and enjoy the moment,” Schmidt said. “I told her 10 minutes ago that there really is no difference between a quarterfinal and a semifinal. You don’t get a trophy if you win the quarters or the semis, so it’s pretty much the same situation as against Sloane.”

But Williams has the sort of serve that can stifle anyone’s creative impulses, even if Sevastova has been returning superbly: She has won 54 percent of her opponents’ return games and converted 67 percent of her break points.

Sevastova has all the shots, which can be both a blessing and a curse. “Sometimes I use too many shots,” she said.

The drop shot is her signature, and she can use it effectively against even the speediest players like Stephens. But Sevastova will also need to serve particularly well and mix pace and trajectories to keep Williams from finding her range and footing. The problem is finding the time to get organized when faced with Williams’s power and increasing desire to get to the net.

Sevastova has overcome bigger tennis challenges, however. When she retired in 2013, she was 23 and ranked outside the top 100, weary of injuries and the grind of chasing points and cheap flights.

She ended up at the Better Tennis Academy in Vienna, teaching tennis during the week and taking university classes on the weekends.

Schmidt was working there, too, after having helped coach the former No. 1 Thomas Muster when Muster made his quixotic return to the circuit at age 43 in 2010.

Sevastova had much more time on her side when, healthy and eager again, she decided to come back. Her first tournament was a $10,000 satellite event in Egypt in January 2015.

By reaching the semifinal at this U.S. Open, she already has earned $925,000. That is quite reversal of fortune, but her presence at this level is also a gift to tennis aficionados.

In a realm overpopulated with baseline bashers, Sevastova’s game represents a more subtle approach to tennis geometry, one that would have been lost if she and Schmidt had not managed to resurrect her career.

“Look, it was not my intention to bring her back,” he said. “I never said to her, ‘Let’s try again.’ It had to come from her, and it was important that she was the one who decided it, not anybody else. And she’s been great. She’s working hard and now she’s in the semis.”

With that, Schmidt shook his head in the players lounge and chuckled.

“It’s crazy to think,” he said, “where we were four years ago.”

A correction was made on 
Sept. 5, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated Niki Pilic’s French Open history. He was a finalist there, not a champion.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Winding Journey That Began From Nowhere. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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