American and Canadian Women to Watch on the WTA Tour for 2011 - CoCo Vandeweghe

The tennis calendar has turned to a new year. Another year of players hopping from continent to continent, tournament to tournament, trying to reach their goals and live up to lofty expectations. While some players are hanging on to their career, hoping for wildcards and playing their way through qualifying events, there is a whole new crop of players from North America that have been working for years, inching their way up the rankings with hopes of making a huge breakthrough, and becoming one of the elite players in the world. The WTA Tour is stacked with young players looking to make that breakthrough in 2011. Some are on the cusp, some are still a year or two away. In a multi-part series, we'll look one by one at some of the "young guns" of the WTA Tour from Canada and the United States. Let's see who is poised to make that move in 2011.

CoCo Vandeweghe

There may not be many players in the world with more potential than 20-year old American CoCo Vandeweghe. She has the athletic genes in being the daughter of an Olympic swimmer and having a grandfather and uncle who starred as NBA basketball players. She also has the prototypical body type of today's female tennis players, standing 6'1" with a solid build. Add that to her huge serve and dominating forehand, and we might have America's next great tennis player.

What she needs to work on according to her coach Tom Gullickson is her mental game and seeing more of the "Good Coco" and less of the Bad Coco."

Vandeweghe is coming off a 2010 where there were more positives than negatives. On the positive side, she netted wins over Alison Riske, Gisela Dulko, Vera Zvonareva, Jarmila Groth, Aravane Rezai and Alla Kudryavtseva. Her negatives included the 6-1, 6-0 thrashing he took courtesy of Sabine Lisicki in the first round of the U.S. Open and the 12 first round defeats she suffered in 2010 events.

CoCo has all the tools to get into the top-50 by the close of 2011. She should get into many WTA events, but she will have to play in some qualifying draws. She lost out on the USTA's Australian Open wildcard by losing to Lauren Davis in the playoffs in December, but she will be in Australia hoping to cause some damage "Down Under."