A few weeks shy of her 30th birthday, Jessica Pegula felt like she needed to make a change. She was the No. 4 player in the world — she’s still No. 5 in the WTA rankings — and yet she was again reeling from an early exit at a Grand Slam tournament. Her window to finally break through and win a major is going to close eventually and Pegula decided she needed to try something new.

A few weeks after her second-round exit from the 2024 Australian Open, Pegula fired longtime coach David Witt and replaced him with Mark Knowles and Mark Merklein, neither of whom had ever coached in the Women’s Tennis Association before.

Pegula, who has never advanced past the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam tourney despite spending most of the past three years ranked in the top five, is trying to finally break through behind bold decision-making.

“I haven’t really switched that many coaches throughout my career,” Pegula said. “It’s just trying to understand what my mentality is and how they think they can help me in my game.”

On Saturday at the 2024 Miami Open, Pegula scored her first win with the new coaching duo in her ear, advancing to the Round of 32 on the grounds of Hard Rock Stadium after Zhu Lin retired late in the second set with Pegula up 6-4, 4-1.

After losing her opening matches at the 2024 San Diego Open in February and 2024 BNP Paribas Open earlier this month, Pegula made progress this weekend with a mostly stress-free win on the grandstand court.

About a month and a half into her relationship with her new coaches, Pegula is still adjusting.

“It’s kind of a relearning curve,” Pegula said. “Obviously, I’m at a different place in my career than I was five years ago (when she last made a coaching change), so that also adds to it, but I think it’s just seeing how they can help me.”

Before the San Diego Open, Pegula went out to Dallas to spend a week with Knowles, getting instruction from one of her new coaches, but also just trying to learn some of his personality and coaching quirks.

The new coaches aren’t trying anything groundbreaking with Pegula. As Pegula describes it, their focus is just on getting her back to basics, which isn’t such a bad idea.

As the No. 5 player in the world, Pegula doesn’t have any sort of talent problem. Those too-early exits at Grand Slams, though, suggest a need to diversify her game and become more consistent.

“(It’s) all stuff I’ve worked on before. It’s just fine-tuning certain things,” Pegula said, “things I feel like could get a little better or things I do well and it’s just getting more comfortable using them in a match.”

Knowles and Merklein also bring a slightly different perspective. The coaches have spent their entire careers coaching men. While the difference isn’t so extreme, Knowles and Merklein are still used to working with different personality types.

Pegula had her choice of coaches and she went with these two for precisely that reason. She didn’t want someone “recycled.” She wanted something fresh and now she’s getting it.

“It was definitely a little bit of an adjustment,” Pegula said. “(We’re) just getting to know each other on the court, which is really the biggest part of it — what I like and don’t like; what cues work, what don’t; what I respond well to, so that’s definitely been a learning curve a little bit, but all part of the process.”

American stars lose after long delay

Sunshine finally smashed through the clouds above Miami Gardens around 2 p.m. on Saturday after more than 24 hours of near-nonstop rain, but the day still was a dark one for American stars at the Miami Open.

Tommy Paul, the No. 13 seed, retired because of an ankle injury; Frances Tiafoe, the No. 21 seed, fell to Christopher O’Connell; and Taylor Fritz, the No. 12 seed and top-ranked American man in the field, suffered a stunning upset loss to Brazil’s Thiago Seyboth Wild inside the stadium.

Seyboth Wild, who is now into the third round after making the tournament field in qualifying, felt right at home in South Florida, where a large swath of Brazilian fans made the center-court showdown feel like a home match for Seyboth Wild.

As fans waved Brazilian flags and donned soccer jerseys, Seyboth Wild shocked Fritz with a 6-4, 6-3 win, sending three of the top four Americans bowing out of the Open before the sun set on the first Saturday of the tournament.

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