David Quayle remembers pacing around his house after the phone call. The 26-year-old from Wigan says he was told in May to fly to Florida to help Serena Williams prepare for a return to professional tennis, and that he kept the trip to himself — only his family knew where he was going.
Quayle, an established hitting partner since his days on the Futures Tour, spent just over a week hitting on a hard court at one of Williams' Floridian properties. He stayed nearby with Jarmere Jenkins, who once served as Williams' hitting partner and who will now coach her alongside Rennae Stubbs.
That Florida block was not Quayle's first work with Williams; he had trained with her at the Mouratoglou Academy for the best part of a month before she returned from maternity leave at the 2018 French Open. He is also the hitting partner who shared courts with Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz at last year's Wimbledon — experience he says made the Florida call feel like a step forward rather than a surprise.
Quayle says the sessions were built with discretion in mind. He describes an excitement around the plan to play Queen's, but stresses the secrecy: he didn't tell anyone about the trip except his family and found it thrilling to be one of the few in on the news before it broke to the wider tennis world.
Beyond secrecy, the practical work was clear. Quayle says Williams remains at a very high level and calls her the ultimate professional; he added that, for him, she is the greatest of all time and that shows in how she works on court. Those assessments are not idle praise — the week in Florida was focused on concrete preparation rather than publicity.
Wet weather in London has limited grass-court practice ahead of Queen's, and Quayle has been helping source indoor courts at the Hurlingham Club and the National Tennis Centre so Williams and her practice partners could keep sharp. Tournament rain has meant that much of the pre-match work has been moved indoors, a small logistical headache that Quayle helped smooth out.
Organisers will see Quayle in Williams' support box this week after he was officially hired as her hitting partner for the trip to Queen's. Williams is partnering Victoria Mboko in the doubles draw, and the pair are scheduled to face third seeds Nicole Melichar-Martinez and Erin Routliffe in the first round.
Jarmere Jenkins' role as both nearby practice partner in Florida and member of Williams' coaching structure with Stubbs adds another experienced voice to the team. Jenkins' offhand request to Quayle to "send me the photos" captures the informal intensity of the build-up: small details and trusted hands rather than an obvious public campaign.
The friction in this story is not secrecy itself but what secrecy covers. Quayle insists Williams is still operating at a top level and that the sessions were serious, yet keeping the return quiet leaves an open question most fans will want answered this week — can carefully guarded preparation, much of it on hard courts and indoors, translate to match wins on grass?
What happens next is simple and unavoidable: Quayle will sit in the box as Williams and Mboko take the court against Melichar-Martinez and Routliffe in the first round, and the answer to whether the hush-hush Florida work paid off will arrive point by point under Queen's lights and within the wider conversation about the HSBC Championships run-up to the grass season.
