For Danielle Collins, good things come in pairs.
Eight days after winning the Miami Open, the most significant tournament victory of her career, the 30-year-old American concluded a dominant week at the Charleston Open with a 6-2, 6-1 demolition of Daria Kasatkina to make it back-to-back titles.
It is the second event in a row at which Collins has dropped just one set – for Bernarda Pera last week, read defending champion Ons Jabeur this – and the second time in her career that she has won two events in succession, following her twin triumphs in Palermo and San Jose in the summer of 2021. When she’s hot, she’s hot.
And for the past fortnight, Collins has been on fire. This was the Floridian’s 13th straight victory – the longest winning streak of a career that, she maintains, will end later this season – and with it she will rise to 15th in the world, just eight spots shy of the career-best ranking she achieved after reaching the Australian Open final two years ago. It has been a fairy tale run, and there may yet be more to come. With 22 wins, Collins not only stands alongside Iga Swiatek and Elena Rybakina as the season’s most consistently successful player, but is also up to fourth in the race to the WTA Finals, for which she has never previously qualified.
“What a whirlwind, to play the match the way that I did and go out and execute my game plan so seamlessly,” said Collins, who intends to retire at the end of the season to start a family. “What a way to win the tournament – and two back-to-back, so really excited about it.
“I’m so locked in and concentrated into what I’m doing right now, I think that’s been one of my biggest areas of improvement, and when I’m this concentrated it makes it tough for anyone.”
It certainly made it tough for Kasatkina. Her affinity with the tournament where she won the first title of her career in 2017 is deep-rooted, and her spirited efforts to keep Collins at bay, even as the American blasted 37 winners and eviscerated her second serve, made plain how much she craved a second success.
By the latter stages of the second set, however, Kasatkina looked utterly bewildered, just as so many of Collins’s opponents have over this golden period of her career. As she addressed the crowd afterwards, the Russian spoke emotionally of how much the event means to her – “Charleston is maybe the only place where I feel like home, being far from home,” she said, her voice faltering – but her desire was no match for Collins’s quality and aggression.
“Danielle is now playing on the highest level,” said Kasatkina. “It’s not just me, there’s 12 players before who couldn’t beat her.
“She was a hurricane on the court today. I tried everything I could, but today unfortunately it wasn’t enough. This happens. She’s playing with wings, let’s say – she’s fearless and doing her stuff.”
The battle lines were drawn as early as the second game, a miniature epic spanning 12 minutes and eight deuces in which Collins pounded the ball relentlessly while Kasatkina scrambled, retrieved and did her best to counterpunch. The obvious question was whether the 26-year-old, taken the distance in three of her four previous matches, would have the physical, mental and emotional reserves to cope with the power and intensity coming her way. The blazing backhand return with which Collins converted her fourth break point suggested it would be a tough afternoon for Kasatkina, and so it proved.
That early break set the tone for all that followed. Despite struggling to make her first delivery, Collins was near-perfect when she did so, dominating her own service games while making constant inroads into Kasatkina’s. She saved the only two break points she faced, while her pedal-to-the-metal aggression on the return limited Kasatkina to a success rate of just 28% behind her second serve. When Collins drilled a pair of untouchable backhands to break early in the second set, there would be no way back for the beleaguered fourth seed.
For Collins, who has been beset by so many injuries and physical challenges over her eight years as a professional, this remarkable two-week run has offered a glimpse of what she can achieve with a clean bill of health. Now she will hope to carry her momentum into the European clay-court swing.
“I had a lot of matches in Miami, and I had a lot of matches here,” said Collins. “To be able to physically battle and push myself to a new limit gives me a lot of confidence. I’ve been so happy to be, obviously, playing at the level that I’ve been playing, but to be able to back it up two weeks in a row has just been fantastic.”