Women’s Tennis Is the Predator’s Playground

Pam Shriver was nine years old when she first walked onto a court with Don Candy. He was 40. He became her coach, then her chaperone on the professional tour, then, when she was 17, and he was 50, married, and responsible for her welfare, her partner in what she has since described as an inappropriate and damaging relationship.

It lasted five years. It shaped everything. She told ESPN in 2022, more than four decades after it started, that the relationship hurt her tennis, her performance, and her ability to form healthy relationships. Safeguarding measures for young female athletes at that time were, by her account, nonexistent. She did not know who to turn to.

Shriver came forward with that story four years ago. She said she did it because the problem had not gone away. She said she believed abusive coaching relationships were alarmingly common in sport as a whole, but that her particular expertise was in tennis, where she had witnessed dozens of instances across more than four decades as a player and commentator. Every time she heard about a player dating their coach or saw a male physio working on a female body in the gym, her alarm bells rang.

She was right. And two years later, she was back. This time, in a hotel corridor at the 2026 Australian Open, she came face to face with a man she recognised.

Women’s Tennis Is the Predator’s Playground

The Coach Who Came Back

Rafael Font de Mora had not been a visible presence on tour for several years. Then, in January, he returned as the coach of 24-year-old American Peyton Stearns. Shriver knew his history.

Font de Mora had coached Meghann Shaughnessy in Arizona in the 1990s and early 2000s, beginning when Shaughnessy was 13. She was 14 when she moved from Virginia Beach to Phoenix to live in Font de Mora’s house. He was 25 at the time. They became engaged when she was 19. Her parents twice tried to remove her from the program. The USTA declined to fund Shaughnessy’s career, with a source close to the organisation confirming that concerns about the relationship were a factor in that decision. Font de Mora maintained the relationship was platonic until Shaughnessy turned 18. They eventually split in 2005. Shaughnessy has not made allegations of misconduct.

Shriver filed a complaint with the WTA’s director of safeguarding and the US Centre for SafeSport. A second former player, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, filed a separate complaint alleging that Font de Mora had exhibited aggressive, physically and verbally abusive behaviour toward her, including swearing in her face and hitting balls aggressively in her direction. 

Her account was broadly corroborated by a third player who had also worked with him. A fourth player, Anna-Lena Groenefeld, had her career shredded in the aftermath of their split. According to contemporaneous reports, Font de Mora filed a million-dollar lawsuit against her for lost earnings, and she is reported to have claimed he briefed other players on how to beat her. Groenefeld had risen from 444th in the world to 14th under his coaching. After their acrimonious separation, her ranking declined quickly.

Font de Mora denied everything. He suggested the WTA contact Stearns and her trainer for a better picture of his methods. Stearns eventually confirmed the split, offering no details beyond saying she did not wish to dive into the reasons.

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

The Font de Mora case sits alongside one of the biggest stories in women’s tennis over the past two years: the investigation into Stefano Vukov, Elena Rybakina’s longtime coach.

Their partnership led to her Wimbledon title in 2022, but the WTA’s investigation found that Vukov had committed abuse of authority and abusive conduct toward Rybakina. According to sources briefed on the findings, Vukov called Rybakina stupid on multiple occasions and told her that without him, she would still be in Russia picking potatoes. He was given a one-year ban, which he appealed. Following a successful appeal, the suspension was lifted, and Vukov returned to the tour at the Cincinnati Open. Throughout the entire saga, Rybakina defended him publicly and insisted he had never mistreated her.

Two investigations. Patterns separated by decades but structurally identical. A male coach with significant authority over a female player’s career. Behaviour that those outside the relationship found alarming. And a player who, for reasons that deserve empathy and not judgment, either could not see it, did not want to, or calculated that the professional cost of saying so was too high.

The landscape of the coach-player relationship in women’s tennis has always been unusual. Young women, often teenagers, are placed in the hands of male coaches who travel with them full-time, manage their schedules, control their physical preparation, monitor their diets, and serve as the primary authority figure in their professional lives. This is not a structural aberration. It is the standard model.

Parents may accompany their daughters through the early years of a professional career, but by the time a player is in her early twenties, the coach is frequently the person she sees most, trusts most, and depends on most. The asymmetry of that dependency, professional, financial, geographic, and emotional, is enormous. And it operates almost entirely without oversight until something goes wrong.

The Numbers That Don’t Tell the Full Story

The WTA’s safeguarding database currently lists 102 individuals in tennis subject to sanctions, ranging from contact restrictions to permanent ineligibility. One hundred and two. That number covers the cases that were reported, investigated, and concluded with a finding. It says nothing about the dozens of instances Shriver has witnessed over four decades that never became complaints, never reached a safeguarding director, and never made it into a database.

The culture of silence she described in 2022 has not dissolved. The second player who filed a complaint about Font de Mora requested anonymity specifically because of fears of retaliation and the importance of maintaining relationships within the tennis community. In 2026. With a formal complaints mechanism in place. Still afraid to put her name to it.

That is the real number. Not 102. Something considerably larger, distributed across decades, most of it never formally acknowledged because the costs of coming forward remain too high and the system’s memory remains too short.

Font de Mora’s history was not a secret. The WTA’s own assessment of Shriver’s complaint acknowledged that it did not add new information to what was already known about the Shaughnessy relationship. The WTA already knew. The sport already knew. He came back anyway, and it took Shriver walking past him in a hotel corridor to trigger an investigation.

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

This is the central, uncomfortable question the Font de Mora and Vukov cases together force into the open. Not whether bad actors exist in tennis’s coaching ecosystem. Of course they do, as they do in every sport. The question is why the institutional response consistently lags so far behind what is already known, and why the burden of protection falls so heavily on individual survivors willing to speak.

Shriver herself posed the question on social media. When will professional tennis treat anti-abuse with the same seriousness, investment, and conviction as anti-corruption and anti-doping? It is time.

The WTA has a safeguarding code. It has a director of safeguarding. It has the infrastructure. What it has not yet demonstrated is the institutional will to use that infrastructure proactively rather than reactively, to maintain and enforce a list of coaches whose histories are already documented, and to protect players from arrangements that the tour has known about for years before anyone filed a formal complaint.

Peyton Stearns is 24. She met Font de Mora when she was a minor and began training at his academy intermittently. When asked at the Australian Open whether she was familiar with his history on tour, she said she knew. It had been around. The tour knew. The complaint was filed anyway, belatedly, by a woman who has been trying to make this point since 2022. That timeline, known for decades and reported only because someone happened to walk past in a hotel, is not a safeguarding system. It is a scandal waiting to happen, repeatedly.

Tennis has the tools to do better. It is choosing, through inertia, discomfort, or financial disincentives, not to use them. Until it does, Pam Shriver will keep filing complaints. And there will always be another coach, another player, another investigation that did not need to happen, in another hotel corridor, at another Grand Slam.