PHOENIX – At 18, a talented and effervescent Desirae Krawczyk was ready to commit to a college tennis career. But first, she had one thing to share with Arizona State University women’s tennis coach Sheila McInerney.
“I did play a prank on her,” Krawczyk said. “I called Sheila and I just said, ‘I really liked ASU, but I think I’m going to, you know, go somewhere else.’
“And she was so like, ‘You know, that’s all right. It’s great. I’m glad you enjoyed your time here,’” Krawczyk said of her coach’s immediate reaction.
Krawczyk responded with “just kidding” and committed to her top choice of ASU in the same conversation.
“I was like, you know what? She’s going to have her hands full with me,” Krawczyk said. “So I’m just going to start with this one before I even get to school.”
Fourteen years later, McInerney still speaks fondly of the four years she spent coaching Krawczyk. McInerney sends texts to Krawczyk after watching every one of her professional matches.
“She’s always got energy, she’s always fun and she’s a risk taker,” McInerney said.
Krawczyk’s latest risk was the rollout of her joint podcast venture, “The Player’s Box,” at the 2025 U.S. Open.
“It was the quickest launch ever, fastest launch ever,” Krawczyk said. “We joke about it all the time because it took us about a week.”
She co-hosts with Jessica Pegula, Jenny Brady and Madison Keys, two Grand Slam singles finalists and an Australian Open champion, respectively.
“We wanted people to have a glimpse into our group chat, basically, and just into our lives and what we think,” Krawczyk said.
Coming up on the podcast’s one-year anniversary and heading into the 2026 U.S. Open in Queens, the podcast has 45,900 subscribers on YouTube. It’s quite a feat for an athlete who wasn’t always comfortable voicing her opinion publicly.
“I remember as a college freshman, she hated to give speeches,” McInerney said.
While at ASU from 2012-16, Krawczyk played singles and doubles. In her senior season, she was ranked No. 34 nationally in singles, earning All-America honors.
“She was just a really, really good kid,” McInerney said. “Qnd then she was actually a very good tennis player, too, so we were lucky.”
Krawczyk joined the WTA tour after graduating, a move that came with certain adjustments following her illustrious college career.
“We would have three girls staying in one room, four girls staying in one room because it’s so expensive,” Krawczyk said. “You want to limit costs because at that point you don’t have a coach because that’s such an added expense and you kind of just want to go out there and just see how you do to start off with.”
In those early years she became known as a doubles specialist, no longer entering tournaments to play singles.
She won her first mixed doubles Grand Slam title in 2021 at the French Open. Krawczyk said when she and her partner Joe Salisbury made the quarterfinals, he initially thought about pulling out after he lost in men’s doubles.
“He was kind of like, ‘Oh, I kind of want to go back and prep for the grass season,’” Krawczyk said.
“He ended up staying. He was like, ‘You know what? We agreed to play, so let’s just stay in and play.’ And I was like, ‘OK, thank God.’”
She won back-to-back-to-back mixed doubles Grand Slam titles that summer.
“We ended up playing my partner that I played with in the French in the finals of Wimbledon, literally three weeks later and we won,” Krawczyk said.
Later that summer, Salisbury and Krawczyk again held the trophy at the U.S. Open.
“We were there for that,” McInerney said, “so it was a thrill for sure.”
Krawczyk was only the seventh player in the Open era to win three-of-the-four mixed doubles Grand Slam titles in a season.
Despite their own levels of tennis success, the hosts of “The Player’s Box” podcast don’t insist on pomp and circumstance. They began premiering episodes without proper audio equipment and still often record in hotel rooms at odd hours.
“It’s not very tennis-focused as other podcasts are, but we kind of just keep it lighthearted,” Krawczyk said.
They offer food reviews from the cities they visit around the world, and they begin every episode by each sharing their ‘unforced error’ of the week.
The episode that premiered in the middle of the Cincinnati Open, the Masters 1000 tournament in August that precedes the U.S. Open, featured the following unforced errors:
- Brady thought her Uber driver was going to fall asleep and failed to engage in a conversation with him after being brushed off.
- A canceled flight from Toronto to Cincinnati for Krawczyk led to her getting a car transport to Buffalo, then picking up a rental car that she drove eight hours to Ohio.
- Keys shared that four times in a row at the grocery store she knocked into shelving, causing merchandise to scatter onto the floor. Other patrons even made comments to her about the clumsiness.
- Pegula had two anecdotes she would not share on camera but talked about an uncapped lid when she went to shake her bottle, resulting in liquid all over herself.
The group picks the most egregious story as the week’s winner.
“I think people think that we make it up, but we really do not make this stuff up, like it just happens,” Krawczyk said.
Even though they giggle with each other over the mishaps, Krawczyk is candid about how much work the tour requires, including navigating typical travel nightmares.
“I will say I am my own travel agent, so that is something that has gotten better over time,” Krawczyk said. “I’ve definitely booked the wrong flights.”
Krawczyk has more fans than ever before. She even has Pokémon cards with her face on them.
“We had one of our fans make what I think is the coolest gift,” Krawczyk said in the episode before her Cincinnati travel issues.
“If you listen to the podcast, Madison and Jenny Brady will say Des is the one that’s going to go out there, she’s riding her bike through Paris and she’s going to do the escape room,” McInerney said.
The attack move listed on Her Explorer Pokémon card ‘leads the opponent astray, steering them off track of victory.’
“It’s so different,” McInerney said. “I think just the tone of how they talk about things is so fun. You can’t get that when they’re talking to the press.”
As a doubles player, Krawczyk isn’t required to talk to the press at tournaments as singles players are required to do.
“You have to know what to say, what not to say, and I’m learning to speak more in communications – which I probably shouldn’t have skipped that class in college,” Krawczyk said. “I’ve learned so much from how to do media or press about certain things.”
The U.S. Open has changed its mixed doubles tournament to favor top singles players pairing up for shortened matches that take place the week before the official tournament begins. It has kept Krawczyk out of the draw for the past two years.
The women’s doubles tournament begins Sept. 3. Krawczyk has partnered with Storm Hunter from Australia. The draw takes place Tuesday. Serena and Venus Williams will also be playing together.
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