Coco Gauff arrived at the Cincinnati Open this week as a former champion, the fourth seed and one of the few women in the draw with a plausible claim on the title. She also arrived as an executive producer with two films due out in ten days.
Tennis Channel will release The Zina Effect and Serve: Fashion & Tennis on Aug. 24, six days before the US Open main draw begins in New York. Both were made through Gauff’s iROC Media Group alongside Religion of Sports and the network. Both are directed by Vashni Korin, with Chelsea Marotta producing for Religion of Sports. Trailers for each went up Friday, in the middle of a tournament Tennis Channel is carrying exclusively, which means Gauff is on the network’s air and on its release slate in the same fortnight.
The first of the two is the more unusual thing for an active player to put her name to. The Zina Effect is about Zina Garrison, whose career reads as a run of firsts that never became the story they should have been. At Wimbledon in 1990 Garrison reached the final and lost to Martina Navratilova, and in getting there became the first Black woman to reach a Grand Slam singles final since Althea Gibson. Two years before that she had won doubles gold at the Seoul Olympics and taken bronze in singles. Gauff’s framing in the trailer is that Garrison moved the sport culturally in ways a results sheet does not record, and that the absence of a film about her until now is itself the point.
Garrison puts it differently. In the trailer she says she never wanted the pressure that comes with being ranked at the top, and that the only ranking she chased was in what she gave back to the city that raised her. I never wanted to be number one.
In 1992, months after that Wimbledon final, she founded the Zina Garrison Tennis Academy in Houston. It still runs 45 weeks of free youth programming a year, and it has now outlasted her playing career by more than three decades.
Serve: Fashion & Tennis is the lighter of the pair and sits closer to Gauff’s own commercial life. She has partnerships with New Balance and the Italian house Miu Miu, and the film takes up the question of why tennis clothing carries meaning that a jersey in most other sports does not. The trailer runs through looks from Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, including the kimono-inspired dress Osaka wore at Wimbledon last month in tribute to her Japanese heritage. Osaka has been making a version of this argument herself for a while, most recently in Washington, where she talked about what a player wears doing work that speech does not.
Both projects say something about where Gauff is at 22. She has run a media company for long enough that this is not a novelty credit, and she has chosen for her first significant producing turn a subject with no commercial obligation attached to it. Garrison is not a client, a sponsor or a contemporary. She is a player whose place in the sport’s American story has been carried mostly by people who were there.
The timing is not accidental either. Late August is when the audience for tennis in the United States reaches its annual peak, and the week the films land is the week the tournament opens its gates for Fan Week, the free-admission stretch that now runs across eight of the tournament’s 22 days. Anyone who turns up in Flushing Meadows in that window without a ticket is precisely the audience a documentary about a Houston academy and 45 weeks of free coaching is built for.
None of it tells us anything about how Gauff will play. She won the US Open in 2023 and Cincinnati the same year, and she has spent this season working on a serve that has been rebuilt more than once. Her most visible week off the court in 2026 before this one came at Cincinnati, where she was one of the few players willing to talk publicly about the tour’s new eligibility testing while the WTA declined to. That is roughly the pattern. Gauff tends to be the one who says the thing, and now she is the one financing it.
The films go out on Tennis Channel and stream on the network’s platforms. Broadcast details for the US Open itself are separate. The main draw runs Aug. 30 to Sept. 13.
