👋 Welcome back to The Daily Theory, our morning rundown to help you stay on top of your favorite sport. I’m Allen McDuffee, your guide to all things tennis.

On tap today, we’ve got: Taylor Fritz needs a new voice in his camp, Coco Gauff faces a specific moment, a look at the Indian Wells schedule, Emma Raducanu is off Instagram, Ben Shelton takes on Jack Draper, plus more in tennis news today.

Let’s tennis!

Four Points

🎾 Taylor Fritz’s mini-slump: When your opponent wins 100% of his first serve points for a set-and-a-half, there’s not much you can do. And that’s exactly what Jack Draper did against Taylor Fritz on Wednesday night at Indian Wells. (By the end, it was 91%.) Still, there’s reason for concern for Fritz, who looked either flat or irritable throughout the match — and most of 2025, for that matter. Thus far, he’s lost early in every tournament he’s played, twice to opponents outside the top 50.

  • Time for a new voice: By all accounts, Fritz and his coach Michael Russell are a good fit — similar temperament, similar work ethic, etc. But this isn’t the kind of situation Fritz and Russell can workhorse their way out of. And, to keep this mini-slump from growing into a longer one, it’s time to bring a new voice into the camp. Fritz needs somebody who has been in the top 5, faced these moments, and got out. Russell is not that guy.

🎾 Coco crashes: It’s kind of hard to understand what happened here. For more than two hours, Coco Gauff and Belinda Bencic battled hard. Then, at 4-all in the third set, Gauff made her move to pull away. She went up 40-0 on her serve. And then, somehow, went cold. Wild forehands. An ill-advised drop shot. Frozen footwork. She dropped serve. The same spilled over into the next game, and Bencic closed out the match.

  • A pattern?: We’ve seen this from Gauff at similar points in matches in the recent past. Is it nerves? Is she running out of gas? Something else? It’s unclear, but what is clear is that her team needs to address what’s going on.
  • What she said: “I think sometimes in sports you want to just stay on the high and kind of ride that wave, but especially with this sport, a season as long as tennis, it’s kind of impossible to always be on that high wave, and there’s going to be some low moments I think.” She added: “Overall I feel like, I mean, it’s not as bad as it seems...I lost 6-4 in the third in the fourth round against a tough opponent who’s coming off a 500 win. Obviously I wanted to do better, want to have better results, but it’s not something I can crush myself on.”

🎾 A lull nobody wants: The tournament directors of the 1000 tournaments need to take a hard look at what happens in the middle of the second week of their events. Yesterday, for most of the day, only two courts were in play. This is where the 1000 tournaments start to feel like they’re dragging — and with five days still to go. Stretched out over too many days, there aren’t enough matches to be played in the middle of the second week.

  • The result: At the moment the tournament should be picking up steam going into the quarterfinals, it feels like it’s sputtering out.
  • The solution: Go back to a main draw start on Wednesday, but that won’t happen. And, since it won’t, get rid of the first-round byes for the seeds. Those matches are needed to fill out those holes in the schedule.

🎾 Deleted: In the past 24 hours, Emma Raducanu has unexpectedly deleted her Instagram account. The British tennis star had more than 3 million followers on the social media platform, where she regularly communicated with fans. While some reasonably believe that the move is a response to her recent ordeal with a stalker, Raducanu has not yet spoken publicly about her decision.

  • More than selfies: Raducanu’s Instagram content was certainly about providing access to her fans around the world, but it was also about business. She used the platform to fulfill her sponsor obligations — especially at a time when her time on the court hasn’t been particularly abundant.
  • Next: We’ll see if this is a short-term absence or a permanent solution. No doubt she’ll be asked about it in press at the Miami Open next week.