Agnieszka, former world number 2 and Wimbledon Winner announced her retirement from tennis last November. Retiring as a tennis pro, how do you do that? Well looking at Agnieszka with a big festive charity event; combining tennis, WTA friends, Unicef, celeberties, fun and show bussiness. A social lady, working hard and in for a laugh she left the tour surrouned by 15.000 fans, celeberties and even the President of Poland Andrzej Duda!
Though, if she could choose she would rather be on the tour, than at her retirement party. It is because of physical reasons that she has to stop her career at the age of 30. Accompanied by Carolina Woznicki we had the chance to ask some questions.
How have you changed during your career and what have you learned?
“I think everything is changed. I started when I was 16, so that is 14 years ago. I got to know more and learned to work harder. Tennis was different when I started and mainly that is why we are here and not at the tournaments right now. In the beginning I missed a couple of aspects that I could have done better off court. I could have done more prevention, especially with regard to my body. My body is not strong enough anymore to play, like the others.
What are you definitely not going to miss and what will you miss most of your professional tennis life?
“The first thing I could do when I stopped playing tennis was celebrating Christmas without a passport in my hand. For the first time in eighteen I could just relax and enjoy our family time. And I think this is something you can’t do much on tour. I think now I started a pretty much normal life having time for doing things I could not do before. I think this is the biggest difference between being a pro and staying at home. And Obviously I still like to travel, but I won’t need to carry ten rackets in my bag. That makes quite a difference”, she jokes.
“Only the atmosphere at tournaments. That is something you are not going to replace for anything like that. The atmosphere is really only there.”
Agnieszka you have won the WTA Fan Award for eight years. So you must be a very nice girl. Carolina what do you appreciate most about Agnieszka?
“Obviously I think she is a very nice person. We basically grew up together. I have known here since we were 7 or 8 years old. I think her character I appreciate most. She is a very hard worker, sweet, polite and thoughtfull. I respect the things she has done on and off the court. It takes a lot to not only think about yourself in an individual sport, but also about others. So, you know I’am just very happy that I can be here. We all know that our tennis career will come to an end, but the great thing is that we have friendships for life. And I think this is one of the best things in tennis, that you built these friendships. At least I hope she feels the same way.” And both ladies start to laugh.
You could say that the four important aspects of the tennis sport are the mental, physical, technical and tactical aspect of the game. Which one is most important to master?
Carolina: “I think you need to have a bit of everything. If you are not physical strong and healthy, you can’t play. If you don’t have the mentallity and the abilbity to come up with solutions when you are playing, you are not going to get the top. Well, you can get away with a bit of a okay technique if you are a hard worker. And you need good tactics as well, unless you can really overpower players. But at this point, I think it is very hard to overpower, because people are so physical strong.”
This was all that there was time for. However, we can guess the answer to our next question: ‘How do you combine achieving your goals as a professional with having fun and enjoying the process more than only the result? Probably by enjoying friendships on tour, doing things for others as well as for yourself and.. looking at Agnieszka and Carolina, keep laughing!
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