Danielle Collins: ‘I’m proud of how I was able to work my way to the top. To really, truly earn it’

The landscaper's daughter who couldn't crack her college team's lineup opens up about retiring while the getting's good from a career defined by overachievement

In the fall of 2012, when she was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Florida, Danielle Collins joined a tennis team fresh off an NCAA championship and filled with collegiate players of the highest caliber. Unfortunately, she wasn't one of them. During her year in Gainesville, Collins wasn't able to crack the lineup.

Collins and I first spoke by phone in May, on the heels of her back-to-back victories on the hard courts of Miami and the green clay in Charleston. She is the current world No 11 and, come the end of this 2024 season, after eight years on tour and nearly $9m in prize money, plans to retire. There is an uncanny delight in the fact that of her four WTA singles titles, half were won in quick succession in this final stretch of her career, as though somehow the conviction in what she wants for her life off-court - time, freedom, the chance to start a family - has unlocked a sense of liberated clairvoyance. She is going to retire, but first, she is going to win. In an era of players calling it quits when their bodies and years on courts have extended and bended long past their physical prime, Collins is doing an unusual thing. She's leaving the court while the getting's good.