Aryna Sabalenka’s relationship with her team has never looked much like a typical player-coach setup. She has signed fitness coach Jason Stacy’s bald head before matches, calling it good luck, nicknamed him “Grandpa” during a trust challenge and had even gotten matching tattoos with her coaching staff. That closeness, it turns out, was forged under circumstances far less glamorous than the tattoos and dance videos suggest.

In an emotional interview with Front Office Sports, Stacy recalled sharing hotel rooms with head coach Anton Dubrov and searching for the lowest plane ticket fares well into Sabalenka’s era as a top-10 player in the early 2020s. The Belarusian was personally paying for all the expenses the team faced at that time.

“She was paying for all of our flights, all of our food everyday, all of our hotel, plus our salaries, everything,” Stacy said. “It’s a lot of money, and there were no sponsorship deals at the time. Income was purely from what she won on the tour. That was it. And that was up and down.”

Jason Stacy has coached her since 2018, before she had even cracked the top 10, and head coach Anton Dubrov joined two years later, meaning the core of this group has now stood behind her for the better part of a decade. Early in the partnership, both coaches decided to take a much smaller cut that will only be tied to tournament winnings, to help Sabalenka sustain on her own.

“Before she really broke through, we wanted her to understand that we’re here for the team and for her, not for ourselves. As part of proving that, we set up our agreement where we can have a lower salary, but with percentages so it’s performance-based,” Stacy said. 

The 56-year-old coach, having worked in the industry for more than two decades across both individual players and national federations, observed that there is no structure in tennis coaching as to how the money gets divided, and it really is a matter of trust and negotiation.

That trust is precisely what makes the earnings gap so striking once you actually put a number on it. Sabalenka earned nearly $2 million in 2018, but much of that was directed back into her own and her team’s tennis-related costs, which is no unique occurrence in the sport. Players who have made a lot of money can still have trouble paying for the basics, as this year’s French Open runner-up Maja Chwalinska admitted when she spoke about her struggles to pay to stay in a hotel at the tournament despite coming in with career earnings of nearly $1 million. Against that backdrop, Sabalenka now sits second on the WTA’s all-time career earnings list with more than $50 million in prize money, only behind Serena Williams.

She claimed the world No. 1 position in October 2024, and has been earning over $8.2 million in winnings each year since 2023. But the world No. 1 position is by no means guaranteed for her as she goes into the US Open, having just about 350 points in front of second-ranked Elena Rybakina and no major title wins since her Sunshine Double victory in March. 

The coach spoke on the strain of keeping up with that standard, with a similarly grounded approach to weathering moments of subpar form. “We’ve put together a lot of pieces of the puzzle that for the most part over the last several years, it’s been working very, very well,” he said. 

“But when you’re doing those things and you’re pushing yourself, you’re still going to have moments where you get off track a little bit. But when you trust that process, it allows you to go, ‘You know what, it’s fine. I’m going to keep fighting because it’s the right thing for me to do.'”

Sabalenka’s sponsorship now includes rewards for the whole team

Aryna Sabalenka’s star power has also been felt off the court as brands outside tennis’ traditional sponsors’ fold, such as Emirates, Gucci and Stella Artois, have all jumped on the bandwagon over the last year alone. A few of those deals have been beneficial for her coaching team, too. 

In June 2025, four-time Grand Slam champion Sabalenka was also named a global ambassador and shareholder of the health supplement brand IM8, which also positioned Stacy in front of the cameras regularly. “The cameras are on me talking all the time. I’m not the head coach, I’m not the player. But there’s companies that are interested in hearing the behind the scenes,” he said.

As Sabalenka’s profile and compensation have been rising, the team has been mindful of its duty to ensure they remain deliberate about spending. Jason Stacy, who has written about his own experience with homelessness as a teenager in a book titled The Pressure Code, is sometimes taken aback by the extent to which they have come together. Stacy explained that he had a moment of quiet disbelief during a recent private jet trip to a tournament. 

“I remember sitting there for a moment going, ‘What the heck. Look where we are. This is crazy,'” he said, tearfully, adding that he tries to make a habit of looking back at where they are from as a grounding exercise.

Sabalenka, on the other hand, has spoken about her plans to reflect differently on the journey, saying she will purposefully not dwell on how far she’s gone. “To be honest, I don’t want to stop and look back because every time I stop and try to, I get completely crazy and emotional,” she said. 

“Because it took a lot of work, a lot of tough moments, a lot of things to go through. It’s been a hell of a journey. I try not to do that, I try to focus on staying present.” She has, however, said that reckoning will come eventually, just not yet: “I feel like I’ll be able to reflect at the end of my career to look and go, ‘Wow, that was amazing.'”

Currently, the world No. 1 is on her way to face unseeded Czech player Sara Bejlek in the R16 at Cincinnati. The 20-year-old has defeated seeded and reputed players in the previous rounds to reach the last eight, defeating Karolina Plisokova, Barbora Krejcikova and Ekaterina Alexandrova. This is their first meeting on the WTA Tour, taking place on August 20.