THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, LONDON — Amanda Anisimova had been off the court for less than an hour Sunday night when she talked about the person who has been crucial in helping her reach a first Wimbledon quarterfinal for three years.
“I started working with Shadi this year,” Anisimova said of Shadi Soleymani, who is her physiotherapist — and so much more. “She’s been a huge addition to my team.”
In three months, Soleymani, who was born and raised in Sweden before studying in Canada and the United States, where she played college tennis, has become just about everything to Anisimova. Masseuse, sleep expert, nutritionist, the hands that stretch her out and get her ready to compete, or, during training, assess what she is capable of that day. She will pass her assessment on to Anisimova’s strength and tennis coaches, laying out what she can do and what needs work.
She is a friendly sounding board, but, as she made clear during an interview in the player garden at the All England Club on Monday, not a friend. She is a female ally and travel companion on an otherwise male team in a male-dominated sport. “I’m on her like a mom,” Soleymani said.
By all accounts, Soleymani is having a major impact on Anisimova, a Grand Slam semifinalist at 17 who was barely in the top 200 at this point last year. She had to play the qualifying tournament to try to get into Wimbledon and came up short, losing to Eva Lys of Germany.
Her talent has never been in doubt. Five years ago, her unmatched backhand and stifling ball-striking made her seem like a surefire bet to become one of the next great Americans, maybe even the best of them. But then her father and coach, Konstantin, died of a heart attack at 52, when she was 17.
In the ensuing years, her play became erratic as her motivation waned and as she grieved. She played just 11 matches during the first five months of 2023, then took the rest of that season off to address burnout. Since returning to the tour at the beginning of last year, she has had to manage a series of recurring hip and back injuries.
Enter Soleymani, who had spent the previous two years working with Zheng Qinwen on her road to becoming a Grand Slam finalist and Olympic champion. In Anisimova, Soleymani found someone with plenty of promising raw material but also a lot of damage, a player who had fallen into one of the vicious cycles of tennis.
Her lingering injuries, and the soreness they caused, prevented her from training and practicing properly. She wanted to train and practice, but it hurt to do so. So she would rest, but then she didn’t have the stamina to train and practice more, so when her body felt healthy enough to compete, she was ill-prepared, and then she would reinjure herself, which would prevent her from doing the work that would make her strong enough to prevent her from getting injured.
Soleymani also started to talk to Anisimova, the No. 13 seed at Wimbledon, about her habits.
Anisimova, she said, was very focused on her nutrition and largely followed a vegan diet. But Soleymani also found that she ate a lot of calories that weren’t doing as much for her body as they could. It was part of why she kept running out of gas on the practice court and in matches. She encouraged Anisimova to increase her intake of darker vegetables and helpful proteins, including fish and chicken, she said.
Anisimova, she said, also drank a lot of coffee but not so much water. The caffeine messed with her sleep. Soleymani told her no more coffee after 6 p.m. and Anisimova sleeps much better now.
Health and fitness had never been at the core of her tennis. She’d been so good, so young and for so long that it didn’t really have to be a major focus. Anisimova could win in those days without the hours in the gym or at the track that other athletes have to commit to.
Also, her first-strike playing style didn’t make for a lot of long points. Her matches could be plenty tiring, but tennis was something she did, not something she needed to live. Until, of course, she had to live it, because eventually everyone who has designs on getting to the top and staying there has to do that.
“Just because you get one result doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to go out and do it again,” Soleymani said.
That was Anisimova to a T.
She had made steady improvement through 2024, making the final of the Canada Open in Toronto last August before losing against Jessica Pegula, but then she had to skip the following week’s Cincinnati Open and lost in the first round of the U.S. Open later that month.
This year, she won the Qatar Open in February to gain her first WTA 1,000 title, but soon the soreness returned and she lost her opening matches at the Abu Dhabi Tennis Championships and in Indian Wells, Calif. Then Anisimova had to retire from her semifinal in Charleston at the end of March.
That’s when Soleymani came on board.
Trained as a chiropractor, with a focus on biomechanics, she got Anisimova on a table and evaluated her problem areas, examining the tissues and moving her this way and that to assess her flexibility, which is everything these days in tennis. Players are rarely able to just stand and hit. The game is about who can get in and out of the corners and the most awkward hitting positions.
She found a lot of problems down Anisimova’s left side — the one that takes the impact of right-handed players landing from their serve and stretching for open-stance backhands. There was weakness and scar tissue that caused pain. She hadn’t ever worked with someone like Soleymani, and most of the fitness work she was doing was just putting muscle on top of the damaged tissue, covering up problems rather than fixing them.
Through a combination of massage treatments and targeted flexibility and strength work, Anisimova began to rid her body of that scar tissue. The key, though, according to the people around the player, is that Soleymani essentially serves as a kind of chief of staff on her team and as the chief operating officer of Anisimova’s body, which is the most important instrument for any tennis player, far more important than the racket.
After she evaluates Anisimova at the start of each day, she will work with her fitness coach, Rob Brandsma, and her tennis coach, Hendrik Vleeshouwers, to design the day’s work. She will know if Anisimova is going through her menstrual cycle and advise the rest of the team to adjust the training accordingly. There is often a major emphasis on strengthening and increasing the flexibility of those muscles up and down her left side and in her core.
“We can do that with hip thrusts and glute bridges, then working on overall core strength, everything around her areas that she used to be injured a lot,” Soleymani said.
Soleymani will have to keep doing those evaluations, for at least two more days, after Anisimova kept the vibes rolling Tuesday, through some jitters and a scare from the veteran Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova. She made her first Wimbledon semifinal, with a 6-2, 7-6(9) victory.
Anisimova was in control from the start, as Pavlyuchenkova struggled to consistently make solid contact with the power coming off Anisimova’s racket. But on a day when Anisimova’s first serve hovered around 50 percent, she became vulnerable once Pavlyuchenkova started to push her.
And push her she did, breaking the faltering Anisimova as she tried to serve out the match at 5-3 in the second set, before saving two match points on her own serve in the next game. Then came the see-saw tiebreak. It finally ended on the 20th point, when Anisimova finally landed a first serve and Pavlyuchenkova chunked the return into the net.
Anisimova didn’t leave too much to the imagination in those final games. Her jaw tightened. She berated herself for her missed opportunities. But then the tiebreak arrived, and for a couple of tense moments it looked like she was headed to a third set as Pavlyuchenkova earned three set points at 6-3.
“I really reset and told myself to really go for it in the tiebreak,” she said.
One by one she knocked them off, evening the score at six, then got her own match point at 9-8. She sent a forehand return into the net. It was a temporary reprieve.
Later, she reflected on her journey.
“I guess a bit of a roller coaster,” she said. “I’ve experienced a lot.”
A lot more is on the way, but she and Soleymani had to start the ride slowly at first. Back in April, Anisimova could only practice for about 50 minutes without pain. As the scar tissue dissipated and she grew stronger and more flexible, she could push it for longer, and can now last for up to three hours. She has become more explosive, but the real gain is more macro.
“The stronger you are, the less injury-prone you get,” Soleymani said.
And the more confident that a player becomes that they can do it day after day, the more convinced they become that they will stay that way.
“Everything is centered on my tennis and how I can prepare the best that I can and recover from my matches,” Anisimova said. “Maybe a few years ago, I wasn’t doing it quite to that extent. Everything was also pretty new to me.”
After the break, and with Soleymani’s help, things are different: “I found this new perspective and sense of fighting for everything and embracing the challenges. Maybe I didn’t do it back then quite like I do it now.”
After Anisimova made the final at Queen’s on June 15, she wanted to play another tournament, in Berlin the following week, before Wimbledon, but she and her mother worried about injury. Soleymani evaluated her and reassured her that if she wanted to play additional matches, she could.
“I told her, ‘You’re going to be fine’,” Soleymani said.
“I got you.”
(Top photo: Courtesy of Amanda Anisimova)
