Caroline Wozniacki, a Former No. 1, Is Seeking Stability

MELBOURNE, Australia — It has been the right time for some long, hard looks in the mirror for Caroline Wozniacki, long No. 1 but now No. 10.

And as if to underscore the point, there were reflective surfaces available in abundance Sunday as Wozniacki posed and swatted tennis balls on behalf of a sponsor on a court specially constructed of mirrored acrylic in a west Melbourne warehouse.

In the last year, Wozniacki has dropped in the rankings, getting passed by her elders (Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova) and her peer group (Victoria Azarenka and Agnieszka Radwanska). She has struggled more in the major tournaments she has yet to win; hired and fired two coaches and even generated undesirable and, from her point of view, unexpected headlines in Brazil for imitating Serena Williams's full figure during an exhibition.

"I was definitely surprised when it got blown out of proportion," she said.

But Wozniacki still gets the star treatment: chauffeured cars, coteries of well-coiffed assistants hovering to ensure her new tennis frock looked just right as the music pulsed through the warehouse turned carnival funhouse.

It is her natural milieu: Wozniacki, now 22, has been in the spotlight since she was 12 years old and a Danish television crew arrived for a profile.

But it is only one of her natural milieus. Wozniacki can shift social gears in an impressive hurry, and her next stop on her Sunday tour was a down-market municipal tennis club in east Melbourne where a small group of Australian representatives from her racket company, many with beer bottles in hand, waited in T-shirts to pose for photographs with Wozniacki and the former Australian Open champion Martina Hingis.

"It was a bit different," Wozniacki said of the transition. "But it was quick and easy. It wasn't painful at all."

Wozniacki's plan for 2013 is to minimize the pain and the confusion; to restore clarity to her game and stability to her off-court structure. She does not intend to rehire another full-time or part-time coach after her experiments last year with Ricardo Sanchez and Thomas Johansson. She said her primary coach for the foreseeable future would be her father, Piotr, and she will continue to seek advice from the Adidas coaches Sven Groeneveld and his assistant Mats Merkel.

This was her system when she finished No. 1 in 2010 and 2011, and she is now sticking with it, which is no novelty in a sport where father-daughter coaching relationships have long been a staple: from Chris Evert to the Williams sisters to the Frenchwoman Marion Bartoli.

"For sure trust is a big thing, and he's also worked with me on the court for so many years, and he knows me best on and off the court," Wozniacki said of Piotr. "It's great to have him there. It's been working well. I like that comfort team around me, and I think I would like to keep it that way for now."Darren Cahill, the ESPN analyst who also coaches for Adidas and knows the family well, expressed support for the move.

"There has to be stability in the camp," Cahill said last week. "I think you'll find that Piotr is a very intelligent man. I think you'll find that he gets a bit of a hard time because of his whole coaching scenario. But Caroline is just as strong-minded as what Piotr is, and she wants Piotr around. She wants her dad in charge of her career."

After struggling for much of 2012, particularly in the Grand Slam events, where she lost in the first round at Wimbledon and the United States Open, Wozniacki finished the season on a roll: winning in Seoul, South Korea, and Moscow and salvaging her spot in the top 10.

But so far, 2013 has not been promising. She lost to Ksenia Pervak in Brisbane in the first round and to Svetlana Kuznetsova in Sydney in the second round. She also has one of the roughest first-round draws of any leading player at the Australian Open: she will play Sabine Lisicki, the powerful but erratic German, on Tuesday.

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