By: Sarah Finkel By: Sarah Finkel | April 19, 2024 | Culture, Lifestyle, Style & Beauty, Feature, sports,
With 449K followers on TikTok and 256K followers on Instagram, Morgan Riddle is a tenniscore social media sensation and professional American tennis player Taylor Fritz’s girlfriend. The two have a place in Midtown Miami, where they reside when not in Los Angeles or touring Europe.
Blonde, fit and fashionable, Riddle has taken the internet by storm with her tennis tour-related inspo in the form of “get ready with me’s,” “travel with me’s,” shopping hauls, outfit low-downs and behind-the-scenes looks into the lifestyle element of the professional tennis circuit.
Not sure how to fit your over 50-pound wardrobe into a carry-on neatly and effectively? Riddle has the answer. Clueless as to how to emerge from the plane without your skin feeling crusty and musty? Riddle has the answer to that, too.
An amalgamation of tried-and-true beauty and lifestyle hacks for the busy female jetsetter, Riddle curates an audience that is not only deeply plugged in for advice, but intrigued by the voyeuristic element of her globetrotting content.
We sat down with Riddle to chat her daily routine (or lack thereof) when in Miami and hopping around the world with her professional athlete beau, her takeaway on the Miami Open and the fashion it inspires, her career as a crossover between a tennis and fashion influencer and much, much more.
What’s a typical day in the life for you?
The unique thing about my lifestyle is that I don’t really have much of a routine. We spend six months of the year in Europe and we have this divided living situation of having a place in the East Coast and having a place on the West Coast, so no day really looks the same at all.
I do try to have certain things in my everyday routine to keep me from not going absolutely insane from having my life uprooted every single week.
I usually try to find a nearby workout studio like a Solidcore or Barry’s. I go on a lot of outdoor walks. I find my local coffee spot to kind of get into a mini routine. I love our place in Miami so much because that area is so walkable; it’s in Midtown, a five-minute walk from the Design District.
Miami is equivalent to a homebase for you outside of L.A. What is your favorite part about being back here?
We got a place a year and a half ago. The interesting thing about Miami is that there are a lot of misconceptions, that it’s the party spot and you go out to Space until 7 a.m. Since we moved to Miami, I’ve discovered that there is this crazy party life, clubs on the beach type of thing, but there’s also this health and wellness side of it which I love.
The weather is beautiful… when I see everyone in my neighborhood, I’m thinking these are the most beautiful people I’ve seen in my entire life. Everyone is so fit and up at 6 a.m. to go to their Barry’s class. The food options are super healthy to order from and walk to (I go to Pura Vida). Living a healthy lifestyle is so accessible.
What are your go-to spots?
Grutman is a big tennis fan so a lot of the times we’ll go to his restaurants and he’ll set us up with reservations. I also really like El Bagel. When I’m in L.A., there’s nowhere to find a decent bagel spot. It’s not a New York bagel, but it’s the best option I can find. There’s this Thai restaurant Phuc Yea. Date night ends up being Komodo. Our absolute favorite restaurant is COTE. We’re close with the owner and chef David Shim, and usually when we go there, he’ll set us up with the most amazing meal of my life. They have this amazing wedge salad. I like Contessa. We go to Socialista, but we’re not huge partiers.
What is Taylor’s schedule like as a professional tennis player traveling the world?
It depends on the day. A lot of times he practices twice a day, so a total of two to three hours of actual practice. He’ll do gym for an hour, then he’ll do treatment for an hour, which basically means he has his physio where they work on all his muscles.
How many weeks out of the year is Taylor not playing in a tournament?
Last year we spent 40 weeks on the road. The 12 weeks he’s home he’s still training. He gets maybe a week-and-a-half break from training every year.
What’s a day in the life adhering to Taylor’s schedule?
The only time that I’m really with Taylor is during his matches, which are a couple hours at most, but with a lot of these U.S. tournaments there will be sponsors/brands that host suites at a match. Celsius was doing an activation at the Miami Open this year and I’ve been working with them for a year and a half. There are beauty companies that host suites so I’ll do content with the brands and friends will come to the tournaments, that sort of thing.
When we’re traveling and there are places that aren’t really a home base, I usually utilize the places we’re in for my content. A lot of my content on YouTube and TikTok is specifically travel content so we’ll be in Rome and he’ll be practicing the whole day, and I’ll go to a museum and try new restaurants and get vlog content for my YouTube, which keeps me busy.
What are your thoughts on the Miami Open as a venue in comparison to other professional tennis tournaments?
They have really good food and alcohol vendors. I think what a lot of tournaments struggle with is making just hanging out on the grounds fun, where you can sit and drink for a few hours before you see a match. Miami Open does a really good job with that, and of course it’s Miami, so the weather is always really beautiful. The courts are super nice and it’s overall just a great tournament.
How would you describe the energy of the Miami Open crowd?
It’s actually really good compared to other U.S. tournaments. I don’t know why this is, but there seem to be way more tennis fans in Miami than other places. When we’re in L.A., Taylor gets recognized once in a while or something, but when we’re in Miami we can’t walk a block outside the apartment without someone asking him for a photo, which is bizarre in the U.S. It happens in Europe a lot because there are so many tennis fans there. I think a lot of the people who are going to the Miami Open are real tennis fans—they have someone they’re really rooting for and they’re not just there to hang out and go to a tennis match. That always makes the crowd a little bit better… if they understand the sport and understand the scoring system.
As the designated fashionista in the tennis world, what would you normally wear to the Miami Open?
I always think of Miami as a city of color so I think my past outfits to the Miami Open have been colorful and beachy. I remember sitting through a match a couple years ago and dripping sweat, so I always have to cater my outfits around what potential there will be that I’ll be sitting in the heat for three hours straight. Little mini dresses, maxi dresses, silk dresses, that sort of thing… comfortable and breezy. It’s been really fun. The last couple of years I’ve always been the type of person who loves to dress up, so I’ve always dressed up for matches even before I was doing content creation. I’ve seen fan fashion shift in younger girls and women my age, that people dress up a lot more for matches. I see it because people tag me in their stuff on Instagram when they do.
What would you wear outside of a tennis match when you’re out and about in Miami?
Day-to-day I basically only wear athleisure in Miami. If I want to wear tennis-core, then I do a little Wilson outfit because we play so much tennis when we’re in Miami. For nights out, I’m much more a dresses and skirts kind of gal than pants and jeans, so I tend to usually veer toward little dresses or maxi dresses whenever I go out at night.
What were you doing before venturing into social media?
I posted my first video two years ago. I didn’t really start putting content out full-time until about a year and a half ago. I used to work in the nonprofit space in a corporate setting. I had eight internships in college and some of those happened to be in social media/influencer marketing, fashion PR and media relations. I worked at an agency on the influencer marketing side, where I was doing the deals and paying the influencers.
How did you first fall into the influencing space on the content creation side? Is this something you always wanted to do?
How it happened was two years ago I was at the Australian Open (I left my job at the time because it wasn’t the best fit for me), and I posted a TikTok for fun, just a fun little ‘get ready with me’ for my boyfriend’s match, not really thinking anything of it. Then typical story, it went viral. Then I just did another one, then another one, and then I started getting brand deal offers and thought, oh, maybe I can try to do this.
And it’s really ideal because at that time Taylor and I had already been dating for a couple of years and I was trying to figure out how I’m going to make my life work with his really bizarre, extreme lifestyle of living out of a suitcase and in a hotel, and balancing that with the nine-to-five where I’m working on PST time felt really impossible to me. Everything that I did online was very organic and authentic; I didn’t really have any motive outside of posting content and having fun with it.
What has been the driving force behind your content creation as a tennis girlfriend on tour (most of the time)?
The last couple of months I worked with Wimbledon in an official capacity by hosting Wimbledon Threads, which was a fashion lifestyle show for them, and I am starting to do some more official work in the tennis world. The last two years my goal has been to bring a younger audience to tennis because when I first started posting content there was no one in the tennis world posting content like me. There were no partners on tour who were posting anything similar, no one giving that behind-the-scenes look from this sort of Gen-Z perspective on TikTok. So that’s something I’ve been doing the last two years, as well as bringing back fan spectator fashion to the sport. Wimbledon has always been really great about that, but I think for a lot of other tournaments people just dress casually.
How do you see your brand evolving over time?
I think what’s so great and fun about sporting events is obviously the sport, but what I focus my content on is everything around the sport—the food, the fashion, the lifestyle, the travel. I’m interested in branching out into other sports that I don’t necessarily feel are entirely catering to female fanbases. I think sports are having a big moment for the female fan right now. The Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce thing, for example, and just how many brands are interested in sports right now. I want to kind of capitalize on that opportunity and just keep pursuing exactly what I’ve been doing because it’s something I’ve been interested in from the start. I went to the Super Bowl this year with some brands and that was really cool.
What’s in store for you and Taylor in the near future?
I think I’m going to do the Paris Olympics this year and go make content about all the summer sports. Taylor is playing in the Olympics there and I think that will be a really cool content opportunity and a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Photography by: Courtesy of Morgan Riddle