“You feel like she has no limits” – Former coach Perret on Caroline Garcia

Bertrand Perret, who helped Caroline Garcia qualify for the WTA Finals but parted ways with the Frenchwoman just before the event, talks about his 11 months with the new world No 4

Caroline Garcia and Bertrand Perret during the 2022 Australian Open Image Credit: Antoine Couvercelle / Panoramic

Haresh Ramchandani

November 9, 2022

Bertrand Perret, the former coach of WTA Finals champion Caroline Garcia, has said it was a blast to work with the 29-year-old but admitted he had a difficult time trying to help the Frenchwoman overcome her perfectionist streak.

Perret worked with Garcia from the beginning of this year, helping her get back to the top 10 but parted ways with the Frenchwoman just days before the WTA Finals in a move that surprised many.

That split did not seem to have a big impact on Garcia’s on-court performance as she won the biggest title of her career on Monday night, becoming only the second Frenchwoman to win the WTA Finals.

Hehe 🙃🗞📰🎾👧🏻🏆
Merci @lequipe 🙌🏻🤩#FlyWithCaro @WTA pic.twitter.com/pXQsMGeSgt
— Caroline Garcia (@CaroGarcia) November 10, 2022

Garcia “Masters-cheffe”

Garcia’s win was big news back home in France where she made the cover of L’Equipe. The daily also interviewed Perret on Garcia’s win where he spoke about his time with the 29-year-old but did not address the split between the two.

“Clearly, when you see her play the way she did this week or in other tournaments like Cincinnati, you feel like she has no limits. There is still room for improvement. She still can be better, be more confident, in particular at the net. She even serve-and-volley more to try to destabilize her opponents. A bunch of things,” Perret said to L’Equipe.

“We knew what her game was, how she was efficient in the past and how she wasn’t. To play forward was the logical sequence. We worked a lot on her volley which is the concretization of her offensive game. It made her happy to work this way. It was the culmination of her game. Just the fact to see your player being happy to be on the court, enjoying practicing this way, you say to yourself that with her potential, sooner or later, it would work.”

“Caroline Garcia needed to accept making mistakes” – Perret

Perret added that while working with Garcia was a ‘blast’, describing her as ‘really professional’, the 55-yearold admitted that he had a hard time getting Garcia to shake off her perfectionist streak.

“It was a long journey, she’s such a perfectionist girl…. She’s really professional, it was a blast to work with her, but she’s maybe even too perfectionist. She didn’t accept to make mistakes. With her risky game, if you don’t accept to make mistakes, you get frustrated. You don’t have a type of game which is similar to (Sara) Sorribes Tormo or (Simona) Halep, you have a type of game where you take a lot of risks. If she wanted to get better in practice and to not get frustrated in matches, Caroline needed to accept making mistakes. It was not easy at the beginning, I really had a hard time to make her understand that because she’s so perfectionist. I’m happy, now she sees things relatively a bit more. In a match, it’s okay even when there are some mistakes,” the French coach added.