LONDON — Coco Gauff is happening at Wimbledon, and she is doing it her way.

Gauff is a two-time Grand Slam champion with designs on winning many more, but she arrived at Wimbledon without a grass-court win in two years. After three matches in which she showed how she has adapted to the grass under her feet, she earned her ticket to Thursday’s semifinals another way — by playing anti-grass.

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In Tuesday’s match against Jessica Pegula, Gauff’s first Wimbledon quarterfinal, Gauff dragged her fellow American into a loopier, deeper and scratchier kind of match, breaking Pegula’s rhythm.

There were some lawn tennis classics in Gauff’s arsenal. Her first serve fired, scorching through the court on a hot summer’s day. She played the net points better and more creatively than Pegula did. She served-and-volleyed five times, something she rarely does, and found success on the play three times, as well as showing an improved feel for the footwork grass requires, which runs counter to her innate foot speed and athleticism.

She also stayed low to the ground, nearly scraping her back knee on the dirt behind the baseline on some of her forehands. She pushed through the ball, swinging as much from her thighs as with her arm. That all goes a long way on a surface that is all about balance.

But the core of her victory was earned behind the baseline, with high, heavy forehands and flatter backhands, keeping Pegula’s toes off the whitewash and forcing her to take a backward step, where the ball would rise out of her strike zone, on just about every point.

In this way, Gauff has evolved over the past week into a legitimate contender for a title, precisely because she has figured out when she needs to play against the grass, as well as how to embrace it. Two weeks ago, that felt close to impossible.

When Pegula’s last backhand dumped into the net, Gauff turned to her box and said, “Oh my God, how?”

An hour later, she giggled in her news conference, talking about herself as part of the Wimbledon final four as if it were a punchline of a joke.

“If you told me I would be in the semis of this tournament, I’d be like, ‘You’re funny,’” she said through a laugh before mentioning her recent grass-court ineptitude.

“Also just playing against Jess, I’m confident in myself and the player that I am, but I’m also looking at things. I know tennis. If I wasn’t myself, I would take maybe her to win with that game style she has on this surface.”

Before Wimbledon, Gauff lost her opening match at the Berlin Tennis Open. She flirted with entering another tuneup tournament at the last minute. Tennis players on the hunt for confidence usually can find it only through wins. And she needed a win on grass in the worst way.

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At the last minute, she opted to practice instead of compete. She felt she needed to focus on the fundamentals.

That now appears to have been a masterful choice. For more than a week, she worked on the parts of her game that she could make work on the grass, instead of trying to produce some preconceived notion of beautiful grass-court play.

Her match against Pegula became a microcosm of that process. She began trying to force herself into the ideal of grass-court play — keeping points short. A slew of errors followed.

As the match wore on, she kept those grass fundamentals in her mind, but she also remembered who she was.

“I just really honed in on my game and realized I don’t have to play a spectacular point every time to win, even though there were some spectacular points,” she said. “I think just trusting myself, trusting that my groundstrokes are good enough to be with anyone on this surface.”

There were 12 points that lasted at least nine shots. Gauff won 12 of them. And once she dialed in her serve, she began to dominate the short points as well. She won just 16 of 39 points that lasted four shots or fewer in the first set. In the third set, she won 24 of 38.

Gauff’s main goals for this tournament were to get a win on grass and then perhaps get to the quarterfinals, since she had never been past the fourth round. With her fourth three-set win in five matches, she is into the last four.

“I want to play a match that I can leave, regardless of the result, proud of,” she said. “That’s really the main thing I’ve been thinking about this whole tournament.”

Today she will face Karolína Muchova, a master of touch and feel, in the semifinals. Gauff will know which version of herself she needs to get past her, though she is already long past where she ever expected to be.

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