It is ‘pretty cool’ to ‘have an opportunity to do what you love’, says grateful Ashleigh Barty

WTA Tour
A smiling Ashleigh Barty

She is set to live out of a suitcase for the majority of 2021 and knows there will be “rough weeks”, but Ashleigh Barty is seeing her glass as half full.

After playing only a handful of tournaments last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, Barty left her native Australia for the first time in more than a year in March and confirmed that she won’t return home until after the 2021 comes to an end.

As a result she has been very active on the WTA Tour so far this campaign as she already competed in six events, winning the Yarra Valley Classic, Miami Open and the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix with the latter two coming in the space of a few weeks.

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Asked by WTA Insider if she is trying to make her time on the road “worth it”, the world No 1 replied: “I think the overriding feeling for me is genuinely a sense of gratitude, that I have an opportunity to do what I love.

“When you wake up and feel grateful and know that you have an opportunity to do what you love, it’s a pretty cool thing. There’s not a lot of things at the moment I’d rather be doing than hitting tennis balls and competing and testing myself.

“Of course, without a doubt, I would love to have my family and those close to me here with me to experience it. But that’s not how the cookie crumbles at the moment. So it’s Tyz [coach Craig Tyzzer] and I and we’re going about our business.

“There are going to be rough weeks, we know that. There are going to be great weeks and there’s going to be plenty of downtime in between. It’s important to find a real balance of not getting overexcited and too erratic when the times are good, and also not going into your shell and feeling like the world is crumbling down on you when things aren’t good. That’s a massive one for me as well, knowing that you kind of have to be really accepting that there’s is going to be some good stuff, there’s going to be some bad stuff, and there’s a lot of time in the middle that you decide how you want to approach it.

“You decide how you want to wake up each morning, whether you want to be a grumpy person or a happy person. I promise you more times than not, I want to wake up a happy person.”

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Ashleigh Barty

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