Leylah Fernandez Won Again. The Bigger Story Is How Long Her Second Act Can Last

Leylah Fernandez saved a set point at 5-4 in the first set of the Singapore final, held serve, broke Talia Gibson for the third time in the set and then didn't lose another game. She won 7-5, 6-0 in 1 hour and 38 minutes, running off the final nine games of the match.

It was the sixth WTA title of her career and her first since Osaka last October. At 24, the Canadian has a trophy, a new coach and a question that comes with both: is this the start of something, or a very good week?

A week with proper scalps

The results in Singapore weren't soft. Fernandez beat top seed Mirra Andreeva 6-2, 7-5 in the quarterfinals, and Andreeva is the reigning French Open champion. In the semifinals she came back from 1-6 down against Maja Chwalinska, a French Open finalist, to win 6-4, 6-2 in the next two sets.

That semifinal is the interesting one. Losing a set 6-1 and still winning in three is the kind of match that separates a title run from an early exit, and it's the only set she dropped all week. The final wasn't especially close after the first set, but it took her a bit of grit to get there.

She's also now 6-3 in career finals. That's a good record. Plenty of players with more attention have a worse one.

The coaching change and the calendar

In August Fernandez hired Eric Hechtman, who has coached both Serena and Venus Williams, as her head coach. Her father stepped back, saying he had other projects. Fernandez has said she and Hechtman like how their mentalities and styles fit together. Singapore is the first real evidence of the partnership, so the sample is small.

The title also lifts her only so far. She came into the week ranked 31st and leaves it 26th, after picking up 440 points and dropping 60 from her result at the same stage last year. A WTA 500 title moves a mid-table player only a handful of places, and it says something about how much ground she still has to make up.

The next test is soon. Fernandez heads to the WTA 1000 in Beijing with her spirits high, and the fields at that level don't offer many soft early rounds.

What a second act actually needs

Fernandez was the 2021 US Open runner-up at 19, and she's been living in the shadow of that fortnight ever since. Her trophies since have been solid, but four of the six came at the WTA 250 level: Monterrey twice, Hong Kong and Osaka. Washington and now Singapore are the two 500s. It's a respectable list, and it's hardly a superstar's.

So the question isn't whether she can win a title. She's shown that six times. The question is whether she can win deep runs at the biggest events, week after week, against the best players in the world, and whether she can do it with the ranking to match. Winning smaller events keeps a ranking healthy. Winning matches in the second week of the biggest ones is what moves it.

That's where the second act needs to go. The great players all have a stretch where a good week becomes a habit, and it usually shows up in the rankings before the trophies. If Fernandez climbs from 26 to inside the top 15 by the end of the season, Singapore will look like a turning point. If she's back at 30 by winter, it'll be remembered as a nice week.

Fernandez, for her part, sounds like a player who knows the difference. She spent part of her trophy speech praising Gibson and predicting many more finals for her. That's the tone of a player who's still building, not one who thinks she's arrived.

Can a coaching change and one good week really be the start of a player's second act, or does she need to prove it in a bigger arena first?