On June 29, 2026, Candi Gauff put up a photograph of her middle child in a cap and gown and wrote several hundred words underneath it. Codey Gauff had finished high school on May 1 as a home education student in Palm Beach County, Florida, working through the state’s Virtual FLEX coursework while he traveled the country playing baseball. “Your high school journey was uniquely yours,” his mother wrote, “a path that required determination, discipline, sacrifice, and courage.”
It was the second time she had arranged one of her children’s schooling around a sport. The first time, the child was Coco.
Candi Odom Gauff, 55, is the mother of Coco Gauff, who has won two Grand Slam titles. She competed in the heptathlon at Florida State University, taught fourth grade in Atlanta, and left that classroom more than a decade ago to teach her daughter at home.
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Candi Gauff at a glance
| Category | Detail |
|---|---|
| Full name | Candi Odom Gauff |
| Age | 55, born November 30, 1970 |
| Hometown | Delray Beach, Florida |
| Husband | Corey Gauff, married January 13, 2001 |
| Children | Coco, 22; Codey, 18; Cameron, 13 |
| College athletics | Hurdles and heptathlon, Florida State, 1988 to 1992 |
| Career before tennis | Teacher, fourth grade |
She had a competitive record of her own first
Candi Odom won five Florida state heptathlon titles in high school and was twice named athlete of the year by the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Florida State signed her, and she ran hurdles and competed in the heptathlon there from 1988 to 1992. Her score from the 1991 season still ranks among the best in the program’s history.
Track was not her first sport. She told Yahoo Sports that gymnastics came before it, and that what mattered more than either was the competing itself.
Nothing professional was waiting for a heptathlete in 1992. She finished her degree and went into teaching, which was the family business.
The teaching goes back three generations
Her mother, Yvonne Lee Odom, was 15 when she enrolled at Seacrest High School in Delray Beach on September 28, 1961 as its first Black student. She was kept off the school bus. She then taught in Palm Beach County classrooms for 45 years, and in August 2023 the Delray Beach city commission honored her with a proclamation, weeks before her granddaughter won the US Open.
Candi followed her into the profession and was teaching fourth grade in Atlanta by the early 2000s, where her husband Corey worked as a health care executive.
Leaving the classroom for the first child
She married Corey Gauff, a former Georgia State basketball player, on January 13, 2001. Coco was born on March 13, 2004 at West Boca Medical Center in Florida. The family was living in Atlanta at the time, and Candi had come down for a baby shower her own mother was hosting when the labor started early. Codey followed in September 2007.
Coco was in second grade when her parents decided the tennis was worth rebuilding the household around. They moved back to Delray Beach, the town both of them grew up in, and in with Candi’s parents to hold the costs down. Candi left her job and taught Coco at home. Corey eventually left his own to coach her, a change he later described to the Sun Sentinel as going from a single income to none at all. Their third child, Cameron, was born in June 2013.
Doing it again, for a boy who plays baseball
Codey grew up inside an institution his grandparents built. Eddie and Yvonne Odom started the Delray Beach American Little League in 1971 so Black children in town had somewhere to play, and their grandson was playing in it four decades later, a detail his mother put in the graduation post.
He spent three years as a catcher on the San Diego Padres scout team before signing with the University of Missouri in November 2025. The school arrangement she built for him looked different from the one she built for his sister. Coco had her mother at the kitchen table. Codey worked through a state virtual program with Candi as the registered parent, fitting coursework around travel baseball. What the two arrangements had in common was who did the arranging.
Her role on the tour grew after 2023
Corey coached Coco until Wimbledon in 2023 and sat where she could see him. She has told reporters his nerves were reaching her between points, and the two of them agreed he would watch from somewhere else. He did not stop working. Reporting from the 2025 French Open final described him following the match on an iPad away from the court and passing notes to her coaching staff.
The other half of that change surfaced in Coco’s press conference after she beat Aryna Sabalenka for the title on June 7, 2025. She had asked her mother to travel with her more. On a team otherwise full of men, she said, she wanted “some estrogen and some female energy” around her, because women notice more.
Her mother has been at most of it since. She sat in the umpire’s chair on Court Philippe Chatrier during a practice session that same fortnight, which a photographer caught. She went to the Academy Awards with her daughter in March 2025.
Then, in May 2026, someone posted a picture of her sitting motionless in the stands at the Italian Open and asked how she stays that still. She answered in her own comments. Rome has a great many churches, she wrote, and she had been visiting them, and she prays a lot. She also said she does not pray for the result of the matches.
Corey was not in London this month. Jon Wertheim said on Andy Roddick’s podcast that he had stayed behind to help Codey move into his dorm ahead of the season at Missouri. So on July 9, 2026, when Coco lost the Wimbledon semifinal to Karolina Muchova on a tiebreak in the deciding set, one parent was in the player box and the other was moving a teenager into college. The photographers in London filed their pictures that afternoon under the same caption the wire services have used for years. Candi Gauff, Coco Gauff’s mother.
