Roland Garros may have just come to a close less than a week ago, but for some players, the opportunity to make it nothing more than a distant memory cannot come soon enough.  Among them are Maria Sharapova, Simona Halep, and Eugenie Bouchard.  The three women logged forgettable results in Paris and are eager to move on to greener pastures as the tennis calendar shifts to the grass court season.

Of the three, Sharapova is seemingly the one most apt to rebound from her disappointment in Paris.  She knows she was not at her best due to battling a cold, and in hindsight, her loss to Lucie Safarova in the round of 16 was not a bad one. The Czech made it to the final, where she forced Serena Williams to go three sets.  Furthermore, Sharapova is one of the best at employing a short-term memory, rarely allowing any loss to have a lingering effect on her play in the future, so mentally she should approach the grass swing with a blank slate.  The only negative for the former No. 1 is that the back half of her 2014 season was mediocre by her high standards.  On the clay is where she has done the bulk of her damage the last couple of years, and she failed to capitalize on the dirt here in 2015.  There is a silver lining, however, in that with less to defend in the coming months, she has ample opportunity to gain ground.  She has already proven her merits at Wimbledon and the US Open and theoretically has a game that should continue to pay dividends on the faster surfaces.  The onus is on her to put it all together, and if she can master that, there is no reason why she cannot enjoy a great grass season that carries over onto the summer hard courts.

Unlike Sharapova, Halep was not a heavy favorite to win the Roland Garros title.  She was a player whom many picked to go deep into the second week, though, which is why her second-round loss to Mirjana Lucic-Baroni was perhaps more surprising and arguably more distressing.  As a relative newcomer to the upper echelons of the sport, Halep does not have a lot of experience with trying to repeat stellar results from a prior season.  That inexperience was on full display in her opening-match loss at the tuneup event in Madrid where she was the defending finalist, and of course in the defeat to Lucic-Baroni in Paris, where she was also the 2014 runner-up.  Currently ranked No. 3, Halep is hardly spiraling off a cliff, but this is a trend that she will want to nip in the bud.  The good news for her is that she has a style of play that should be aided by moving to the quicker surfaces, but with the need to defend a 2014 Wimbledon semifinal appearance looming just weeks away, the Romanian needs to get her physical, and more importantly her mental, game in gear fast. 

While Sharapova and Halep certainly want to bounce back from lackluster stints in Paris, it is Bouchard who is undeniably in desperate need of righting the ship.  It is no secret that the Canadian has been in a prolonged slump, and her opening-round exit at Roland Garros is the most worrisome result of her troubled season.  Many will remember that 2014 was a breakout year for Bouchard, but it was not because of her steady play from week to week.  Instead, her success was built upon the deep runs she put together at the Grand Slams.  In fact, she was the most consistent women's performer at the majors in 2014.  That has not been the case in 2015, however.  Maybe she is buckling under the pressure of trying to live up to the promise she showed last season.  If so, it is hard to see things improving for her any time soon.  Bouchard already lost her first grass court match earlier this week in the Netherlands, and she has even more to defend at Wimbledon than she did at Roland Garros.  As long as she continues to believe in herself, there is always the possibility she will get back on track.  That said, given the current state of her game, things are more likely to get worse before they get better where Bouchard is concerned.

It is true that tennis careers are filled with peaks and valleys, some small and some large.  Sharapova, Halep, and Bouchard are presently in valleys of varying depths, and all are chomping at the bit to climb the next peak.  The odds of doing so differs for each woman, and only time will tell how successful they prove to be at ascending to their respective summits.