ADELAIDE INTERNATIONAL

December 31, 2022

Danielle Collins

Press Conference

THE MODERATOR: Danielle, welcome back to Adelaide. You've had a ton of success here in Australia. What was your preparation coming into 2023.

DANIELLE COLLINS: Yeah, nothing really special other than just being able to spend some time at home, getting to relax, catch up with family, spend time with friends and just kind of have a couple weeks of normalcy, not living out of a suitcase. Yeah, just being able to kind of take the days as they come and also get some great training in.

Yeah, just try to physically prepare as best as possible.

It's been nice to have a couple of weeks off, and now looking forward to starting off the year hopefully with a good start.

Q. Danielle, can you explain how you will use the Adelaide tournament here to prepare for the Australian Open?

DANIELLE COLLINS: Yeah, I think it's nice that Tennis Australia has provided us with the opportunities to have a couple of events leading up to the Australian Open, and especially after last year for me. I didn't play any of the warm-up events unfortunately because I had COVID and I was recovering from that and almost wasn't able to play Australian Open. That was a real challenge.

It's really nice this year that I have a couple weeks to really get properly acclimated and ready to go in full force.

Yeah, I've always loved coming here. I've played here, I think, two or three times before and have had some great matches and wonderful experiences here. A couple great restaurants in town, too. It's a wonderful city to be in. Looking forward to being back.

Q. Your first-round opponent, any thoughts on Rybakina?

DANIELLE COLLINS: Yeah, I think we've played once before and we've practiced with each other a bit, know each other's games very well. She's very aggressive, big serve, so I'll have to be ready to return well against here and to make lots of adjustments within the match. Yeah, just be able to go out and compete hard and try to start off the year with a strong start. It's always tough when you draw a women champion in the first round, but I think we enjoy competing against each other and hopefully we'll have a lot of fun out there.

Q. Can I ask you a question about last year, the strength of American women's tennis seems more possibly ever than during your career. Would you see it that way, as well? There's so many strong women in the U.S. at the moment. Are you seeing changes?

DANIELLE COLLINS: Yeah, we have so many strong Americans. I feel like it's been like that for quite some time. Especially now I would assume we have at least 15 in the top 100, so that's probably more than any other country I would assume. I'm not 100 percent sure, but probably pretty close.

I think all of us have known each other for such a long time, too, and playing the junior tournaments against each other and then also growing up in the ranks playing in the ITF circuit events, I think we've all pushed and challenged each other, so we have a really great camaraderie within Team USA, and I think it's really helped kind of excel our games having so many strong Americans. Yeah, so I don't know if I could really pinpoint it to anything other than that.

I just think you go to a lot of the ITF circuit events, and even when I started my career and I was playing 60Ks and 25Ks, so many of the Americans I competed against were so strong. Yeah, I would just probably say we just have so much competition and so many players.