Amanda Anisimova — Has Her Career Taken Another Wrong Turn?

A year ago, Amanda Anisimova was playing in the US Open final, her second consecutive Grand Slam final, and it looked like she had definitively made the leap needed to establish herself among the elite of the WTA Tour. On Saturday, she was out in the US Open third round, beaten 6-2, 7-5 by Anastasia Potapova, and dropping out of the world's top 10 in the process.

The whiplash is jarring even by the standards of a career that has already survived one genuine crossroads — and it raises a fair question about whether last year's stunning run to two Grand Slam finals was the arrival of Anisimova's real level, or a peak this version of her simply isn't built to sustain.

This isn't the first time Anisimova's trajectory has bent sharply off course. She reached the French Open semifinal in 2019 at just 17, beating defending champion Simona Halep along the way, and looked like one of the most exciting teenage talents in the sport. She quickly established herself around the top 20 as a teenager, and it seemed like only a matter of time before she climbed even higher and became a genuine Grand Slam contender.

In 2023, she stepped away from tennis entirely, citing the toll the sport had taken on her mental health. Anisimova was just 21 and had already spent several years at the elite level, but she had yet to become a serious part of the conversation around the biggest titles.

Instead, she had established herself as a player capable of making several rounds at WTA 1000 events and Grand Slams, although she remained far from threatening the dominance of players such as Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek. That break, and the fact that she came back from it at all, is part of what made 2025 feel like such a genuine triumph rather than a simple return to form.

Anisimova's comeback season was, by any measure, spectacular. After several months spent trying to settle back into the highest level, she put together a remarkable run to win her first WTA 1000 title at the Qatar Open in February, beating Jelena Ostapenko in the final for her third career title.

Then came Wimbledon, where she reached her first Grand Slam final, including an upset of world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka along the way — and one of the more brutal results in recent Grand Slam history: a 6-0, 6-0 final defeat to Iga Swiatek that lasted just 57 minutes.

Most players would have needed months to recover from a scoreline like that on the sport's biggest stage. Anisimova needed about six weeks — she arrived at the US Open and beat Swiatek in the quarterfinal, 6-4, 6-3, calling it a "dream" to come back from Wimbledon that way, before reaching the final itself, where she lost to Aryna Sabalenka. The run carried her to a career-high ranking of world No. 3 in January 2026.

Almost nothing since has gone to plan. Jessica Pegula has beaten Anisimova three separate times this year alone — in the Australian Open quarterfinal, in Dubai, and again in Cincinnati — and Anisimova's only semifinal appearance of the entire season came at that same Dubai event. Indian Wells ended in a loss to Victoria Mboko, the Canadian Open in a loss to Elina Svitolina, and the French Open in a third-round exit to Diane Parry.

Her coaching setup has mirrored the instability on court: she split with Hendrik Vleeshouwers, the Dutch coach behind her entire 2025 breakthrough, partnered briefly with German coach Sebastian Sachs, then reunited with Vleeshouwers again for the North American hard-court swing — a lot of change for a player trying to rediscover a level she'd only just found.

There's a specific, measurable explanation sitting underneath the run of results. Over the past 52 weeks, Anisimova has hit the fifth-most unforced errors of any player on the WTA Tour, and no player anywhere on tour has recorded a higher unforced-error rate than she has in that same span.

That's not simply an unlucky sequence of tough draws — it's a pattern showing up match after match, and it lines up exactly with a season defined by leads not held and matches that got away rather than opponents who were simply too good. Against Potapova, Anisimova produced 46 unforced errors compared to just 17 from her opponent. Her aggressive baseline game and devastating forehand can overwhelm opponents, but they also give them too many free points when she misses more often than she hits.

Perhaps that ability to be one of the biggest strikers on the Tour puts additional pressure on her to constantly play aggressively and search for winners from different positions on the court. Yes, it often works and produces spectacular points. But it also costs her plenty of errors, and in a sport like tennis, those mistakes can ultimately weigh more heavily than the big shots.

Saturday's defeat fit that pattern precisely. Potapova broke early in the first set and never let go of it, closing it out 6-2, then survived a tighter second set to finish the job 7-5 in an hour and 39 minutes on Louis Armstrong Stadium — good enough to send last year's runner-up home in the third round and end her stay in the top 10.

It's also becoming something of a habit for Potapova specifically: she beat Coco Gauff at the same stage of the French Open back in June, building a reputation as one of the players most comfortable knocking out the tour's leading Americans at the majors that matter most.

None of this means Anisimova's story is heading the way of a cautionary tale. She has already shown, twice now, that she can walk away from tennis's lowest moments and come back stronger — from a mental health break in 2023 to a career-high ranking eighteen months later, and from a 6-0, 6-0 Grand Slam final defeat to a US Open final six weeks after that.

The unforced-error numbers point to something specific and fixable rather than a talent that's disappeared. But after a season this unsettled, with a coaching situation still finding its footing and a ranking sliding back out of the top 10, the question in the headline isn't rhetorical. Right now, nobody — including, probably, Anisimova herself — knows which version of this year turns out to be the real one.