MELBOURNE, Australia — Ann Chisholm contemplated traveling from her Minnesota home to watch the main-draw debut of her cousin Danielle Collins at the Australian Open, but it seemed like a flight of fancy. Collins had lost in the first round of the three majors she played last year, and it made little sense for a relative to travel 10,000 miles to see what might be only one match.
But Chisholm continued monitoring airfares after each of Collins’s first three matches in Melbourne, all victories. Then, in the fourth round, the unseeded Collins defeated Angelique Kerber, the 2016 champion and this year’s No. 2 seed.
It was just past 11 on Saturday night in Grand Rapids, Minn., when Collins sealed the upset, and Chisholm’s inner voice, which had been nagging her for a week to hop on a plane, grew so loud she could hardly sleep.
On Sunday morning, Chisholm reached out to Collins and said she was looking at flights to Australia. Chisholm didn’t want her arrival to surprise Collins in case, she said, it “messed up her mojo.”
After Collins reacted enthusiastically, Chisholm, who has four children, asked her husband and her mother if they would watch over things at home if she went away for a few days. Then she called a Delta Air Lines reservation agent, who pieced together a trip from Minneapolis to San Diego, then on to Los Angeles that would deliver her to Melbourne on Tuesday morning.
Chisholm had about five minutes to pack for her journey to the Southern Hemisphere, not enough time to retrieve summer clothes from storage. So she threw some shirts and pants into a suitcase, and when her family left for church, she left for Australia.
The trip went off without a hitch, and a few hours after landing here in Melbourne, Chisholm was in Collins’s player box at Rod Laver Arena, transmitting positive vibes down to the court during Collins’s 2-6, 7-5, 6-1 win over Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova.
With the victory, Collins, 25, earned a semifinal meeting against Petra Kvitova, the eighth seed and a two-time Wimbledon champion, who recently beat Collins in three sets in the first round of a tuneup event in Brisbane.
“I feel like I’m representing the whole family,” Chisholm said.
In St. Petersburg, Fla., Cathy Collins, a preschool teacher, managed a few hours’ sleep before her alarm went off a little after midnight, in time for her to watch television coverage of her daughter’s match. Collins’s father, Walter, a landscaper, waited until after the match to sleep, taking what amounted to a power nap before starting work.
The house where her parents live is the only place Collins has called home. Some of the neighbors have known her since she was born. A couple that lives across the street has been running over to celebrate every win with Collins’s parents.
“When the doorbell rings in the middle of the night, we know who it is,” Cathy Collins said by telephone.
It was a quarter to 8 on Tuesday morning, and Collins’s mother would soon be corralling more than a dozen preschoolers. She had gone back to bed when her daughter’s match was over, and woke up wondering if the victory had been a Technicolor dream.
“It’s weird,” Cathy Collins said. “It’s like, ‘Is my daughter really in the semifinals?’”
On the other side of the world, Collins described her father as “the hardest worker I know” and marveled at her mother’s stamina.
“I don’t know how my mom is managing,” Collins said. “She’s not getting more than four or five hours of sleep on these match nights, and she’s dealing with 15 3-year-olds. She’s a trooper.”
So is Collins, who was ranked 35th in the world coming into this tournament with an 0-5 record in Grand Slam matches. She seems unfazed.
At Collins’s post-match news conference Tuesday, a longtime tennis journalist from Europe began a question by saying: “I hope you understand that we are used to meeting players when they’re kids. You are different from our point of view.”
He went on to compliment her maturity, which Collins attributes to a route less taken. Her family couldn’t afford the elite academies and junior circuits that mold small children into young professionals, so she went to college on an athletic scholarship to get her seasoning.
She started at the University of Florida, then transferred to the University of Virginia. Collins won two N.C.A.A. singles titles while earning a degree in media studies and making lifelong friends, many of them non-athletes.
“I think not being a child prodigy, not being a superstar at a young age, certainly humbled me, made me in a way work harder for things,” Collins said, adding, “I think it’s kind of made me hungrier in some ways, like not having that, ‘Oh, I’ve always been really amazing at tennis.’ It wasn’t always like that.”
Collins comes across as feisty — her mother said she’d had “a fighting spirit” since childhood. Collins also oozes confidence, regardless of circumstances.
One of her favorite courses at Virginia was Denise Stewart’s introduction to drama.
“One of the things she taught us is sometimes you’ve got to go to your job and you’ve got to sit in that cubicle when you don’t want to for eight hours and fake it till you make it,” Collins said. “And so much of life is acting. You’ve got to always have a positive mind-set.”
Stewart said she was not surprised that Collins had found the big stage. Her success, she said, transcends tennis.
“She is such the right woman at this time to say, ‘Humble is not my jam,’” Stewart said.
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