Last year at Wimbledon, Emma Navarro played what was, at the time, the biggest match of her ascending career. In the round of 16, she walked onto the vaunted Centre Court and faced off against a familiar opponent, Coco Gauff, tennis’s new big thing. Deploying an alloy of patience, problem-solving, focus, speed, defense and occasional pop, Navarro won, somewhat unexpectedly, in straight sets.
A few weeks later, Navarro played the new biggest match of her ascending career. Same round. Same opponent. This time at the 2024 U.S. Open. Here were the two best American players under 25 years old … confronting each other on Labor Day weekend … in New York … at the one major held stateside. As tennis assignations go, few come weighted with more pressure and expectation.
There were 25,000 or so fans in the seats and suites, and millions watching on TV and streaming. Gauff was not just the defending U.S. Open champion, a few weeks earlier, she had joined LeBron James as the American flag bearer at the Paris Olympics. Navarro, meanwhile, was not only the underdog but still the kind of player who could tug a hat low on her face, walk the grounds and—fine by her—stand a decent chance of going unrecognized.
Navarro won the first set. Gauff won the second. The match tightened. Navarro did not. Sharpening her focus, hemming Gauff in uncomfortable positions, and going entire games without missing her targets, Navarro pressured Gauff, who, confidence sundered, coughed up errors and double faults. Gauff played with a look of anguish on her face, while Navarro wore a mask of steely resolve. When Navarro won, she smiled thinly, punched her fist and celebrated—if you can call it that—as though she had expected to win all along.
During the match, the cameras were quick to cut away to Navarro’s longtime coach, Peter Ayers, seated between Navarro’s parents in a courtside box. A former player for Duke, he had helped fashion a specific battle plan and provided simple and upbeat encouragement throughout the afternoon.
But, as ever, Navarro had also leaned on the general sports wisdom of another coach. While this one played tennis only at a recreational level, he spent decades on college football sidelines and knew plenty about the thermodynamics of competition and summoning your best performance when it mattered most. He provided guidance about the role of attitude and accountability in success. And perhaps more than anyone, he had shaped Navarro’s organizing principles as an elite athlete.
He was there from the beginning. Most grandparents are. And though Frank Navarro passed away in 2021, damn if he didn’t leave his imprint on his granddaughter, a player fast becoming one of the brightest stars in the tennis constellation.
The portrait is titled, The Recruit, and it is vintage Norman Rockwell, a sliver of Americana, capturing archetypes of American men. Painted in 1966, Rockwell didn’t have to go far to find his subjects. Leaving his home in Stockbridge, Mass., Rockwell headed to nearby Williams College to depict a football player beside a trainer armed with smelling salts. Above them looms the program’s coach, Frank Navarro, square-jawed and earnest, yet dispensing warm, fatherly advice.
As compensation for the time and hospitality, Rockwell sent Navarro a check for $100, which the coach never cashed. At the time Navarro sat for the painting, he had already been at Williams four seasons and had turned the program around.
He came by the job honestly. The son of a single mom, Navarro grew up decidedly working class in Little Italy and then the New York suburbs, sneaking into Yankees games and working from a young age to supplement his mom’s modest income. In the absence of male models for behavior, he took it upon himself to find virtues and avoid vices. He’d wake up early. He wouldn't drink. He would lean into patriotism, telling people he wasn’t an Italian American but an American who happened to be Italian. He was also a hell of a football player, the starting right guard on the undefeated 1951 Maryland team that beat Tennessee to win the Sugar Bowl.
After graduating college and serving in the Air Force, Navarro embarked on a coaching career. These were the days before buyouts and NIL, but Navarro figured his passion for the job and leadership instincts would overcome whatever uncertainty awaited.
He started as a position coach at Columbia in his mid-20s. By his early 30s, he was piloting the Williams program. He went back to Columbia as head coach from 1968 to 1973. While this was a tumultuous time in the school’s history—at the height of Vietnam protests, students took a dean hostage—the football program was, uncharacteristically, strong. By ’71, Navarro had led the Lions to their first winning season in nearly a decade and was named the Eastern College Coach of the Year.
He spent four seasons as head coach at Wabash College in Indiana. And then, most notably, seven years as Princeton’s head coach. One highlight came in 1981 when the Tigers beat a top-25 Yale team, 35–31. Another came when Navarro successfully recruited Jason Garrett.
Coaching at elite academic schools came with limits. The admissions office added another level of challenge to recruitment. While a handful of players coached by Navarro made it to the NFL—George Starke, for instance, went from Columbia to winning a Super Bowl as one of the Washington Football Team’s vaunted Hogs—few had ambitions of playing beyond college. Not unlike Bill Belichick’s father, Steve, Navarro was well respected among other coaches but never the kind of national celebrity coach appearing on ABC’s Game of the Week. Still, Navarro figured that at smaller colleges, he could really know his players and, perhaps, shape their lives beyond football.
At each stop, he cut a conflicting figure. In some ways, he was a traditional hardass, demanding accountability and punctuality (and dolling out push-ups when those core values went unmet.) As an X’s and O’s coach, he was a traditionalist. But he was also open to innovations like the spread offense and the monster defense he helped devise. He was an individualist, but he was also a leader. He was a football sophisticate but could teach players in a thoroughly comprehensive way.
Long after their graduation, players, some now in their 80s, still remember moments—small at the time, large in retrospect … still recount snippets of dialogue word for word. “If you dropped a pass in the end zone, he wouldn’t say a word,” says one former player. “If you showed up late, that’s when you’d hear all about it.” Into his 70s, George Steinbrenner, one of Williams’s more prominent alums, was known to quote the school’s football coach from decades past. In Indiana, the Wabash football team currently plays on Frank Navarro Field.
“He led by example, he had high expectations and if he knew that he was receiving mediocrity, he found a way to get more from his players and his coaches,” says Bill Cannon, a captain on Navarro’s Wabash teams, now an entrepreneur, living in Charleston, S.C. “He had a great way of getting people to know that he was not pleased and that it was time to do better. And he didn't even need to open his mouth … Coach Navarro was my idol.”
Navarro and his wife, Jill, raised seven sons and a daughter. With a salary that only rarely crossed the line of scrimmage into six figures, the kids all operated on the assumption that they would need to hold jobs and pay for college themselves—which all eight children did.
He parented much as he coached, tailoring his message to the recipient's personality, but mostly leading by example. He balanced work and family. He also combined them. “We always hung around practice,” says P.T. Navarro, the youngest sibling, now a producer at Fox Sports. “I remember pouring bug juice and eating oranges and collecting [tackling] dummies and shagging field goals and fighting and beating each other up. It was awesome for us. … We also saw how hard he worked, his dedication, how [sacred] practice is.”
But by his late 50s, Navarro had grown tired of the coaching lifestyle. The creep of commerce. The 5–4 seasons caused the family to hold its collective breath, wondering if there would be a new home and new schools and a new team next year. From his Rhode Island base, Navarro went into business with some of his sons and managed some real estate properties. Though there was more stability and more income, he missed coaching.
By the mid-1990s, Frank and Jill’s fifth son, Ben, a successful businessman, was living in Charleston with his wife, Kelly, and their four kids (and the charcoal version of The Recruit that Norman Rockwell had sent the family). Frank and Jill would spend the cold months in South Carolina with four of their 22 grandkids. Frank noticed—it was hard not to—that Emma had an athlete's skill set, yes, but also an athlete’s disposition. He called her the “Pink Flash,” a reference to both her choice attire and footspeed. He also watched as she competed with a singular focus, outworked the other kids and warmed to skills-building and the process of improving.
Emma tells the story of competing in a swim meet when she was 10. With her grandfather watching, she lost the race by inches. While she was on the verge of tears, he was smiling. “You lost by a meatball!” he joked. She says that even then, she intuited the message: “That was his way of showing that it didn't matter that I lost. I tried my hardest and I'd been practicing really hard and I put it out there.”
Eventually, she funneled her efforts and energies into one sport: tennis. Frank Navarro revved up his minivan and arrived in front of the house at 5:45 every morning to shuttle his granddaughter to practices before school. Appreciating that Emma was soft-spoken and disinclined to spend the car ride chatting, he would simply blast the heat and blast Frank Sinatra. (“His favorite song was ‘My Way,’” she recalls.)
Without turning the rides into lectures, he would impart subtle lessons. He would pepper her with trivia questions and historical facts, a way of reinforcing that there was more to life than tennis. He would never complain about the cold or the rain or the 5:45 darkness. “So,” she says, “I wouldn’t either.” He would see a red light ahead and release the accelerator. By the time the light turned, he’d speed up. At the end of the drive, he’d proclaim that they didn’t hit a single red light. “His [attitude] was that the rules are not necessarily made to be broken,” she recalls. “But you make your own mind up about a rule. If you think you should break it, then do it.”
At practice, Frank would sit in silence, sipping coffee and leaving the technical tennis coaching to the hired expert. But on the drive to school, he would impress upon his granddaughter the importance of preparation, steadiness and worrying more about improving constantly than winning constantly. He wouldn't tell Ben and Kelly about the doughnuts he bought their daughter. But would report that Emma is doing great, and if she tended toward teenage introversion, so be it, that’s simply who she was.
In part because she lacked look-at-me sensibilities, Emma Navarro was sometimes overlooked by the national federation, the USTA, as it hyped players and tried to forecast greatness. And at 5’ 6”, she wasn’t going to blast anyone off the court with flagrant power. But poise was her precocious gift. In the juniors, she won match after match with her temperament. She would keep her head while opponents would lose theirs.
By the time she was a high school senior, she was the top tennis recruit in the country. She committed to Duke in 2020, then switched to the University of Virginia, where, as a freshman, she went 25–1. Her only loss was to Estela Perez-Somarriba of Miami.
The two rematched in the finals of the NCAA tournament. Navarro being Navarro, she incorporated lessons learned from their previous match, was the superior player in the tight moments and prevailed, becoming the rare player to win the NCAA title as a freshman. Frank Navarro followed the results from a hospital in Rhode Island. A few days later, he passed away at age 91.
Barely a year later, Navarro set off on a pro career. As a young American (and as the daughter of the man who owns the WTA’s Charleston event) she could have groveled for wild cards—golden tickets that afford young players automatic entry into tournaments, rankings be damned. She took the unconventional step—she did it her way—of building her ranking by playing smaller, minor-league events in places like Tyler, Texas, and Midland, Mich. Glamorous, it wasn’t. But she was able, at once, to build wins and stamina under low-intensity lighting.
She kicked off her 2024 season by winning her first pro title in Hobart, Australia. By February, she was in the top 25. By April, she was in the top 20. She qualified to represent the United States at the Paris Olympics. By the fall, she had breached the top 10. In all, she won 54 matches and nearly $3 million in prize money. Finishing the year at No. 8, she was named the WTA’s Most Improved Player for 2024.
On Dec.24, she went to Australia to launch her 2025 campaign. If this punishingly early start time and absence of a proper offseason is a function of tennis’s dysfunction, Navarro doesn’t perceive it that way. In keeping with her grandfather’s default setting of a positive outlook, she simply pretended Christmas Eve fell a day earlier this year.
And Grandpa Frank’s wisdom and mode of being, she says, is a constant companion as she tries to build on her success. “I think I don't necessarily have the unshakable confidence that he had. Yet. Maybe I'm working towards it. But, I love to do things in my own unique way. I never want to just fit in with the crowd or do what everybody else is doing. I think we're similar in that way.”
In 22 seasons on college football sidelines, her grandfather went 99-99-6. And, still, he left coaching with a winning record.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Emma Navarro Is Doing It Her Way Thanks to Grandfather Frank.