In 2012, after seeing a 14-year-old Ana Konjuh smack a ball, Goran Ivanišević asserted: “If she doesn’t become a Top 10 player one day, I’ll be very surprised.”

From the beginning, Konjuh’s career has been threaded with a different kind of surprise, the kind no prophecy can soften. At twelve, she began to feel persistent pain in her elbow. It started as a faint ache and gradually became constant, forcing her to rely on painkillers through much of her youth. Doctors eventually advised surgery. After winning the 2013 junior US Open at fifteen, she stopped competing and committed fully to rehabilitation. The operation gave her roughly three and a half years without pain.

Injuries returned nonetheless. A herniated disc in her back, a severe ankle sprain, and the period when her sister nearly died from encephalitis weighed heavily on the family. During those years, tennis became her main point of stability.

The elbow problem never fully disappeared. In 2017, she rose into the world’s Top 20 and seemed close to establishing herself near the top of the tour. Yet during the North American swing that year, she woke one morning unable to straighten her right arm. Another surgery followed in Croatia, where bone fragments were removed and the joint cleaned. She returned hopeful, but played only one match before three stress injuries forced another six weeks of rest.

She later traveled to the United States for further treatment. Doctors found no major structural damage, only minor debris in the joint. The improvement did not last. Through the 2018 clay and grass seasons, the pain persisted. In 2019, she changed rackets, adjusted her technique, and tried to manage the problem conservatively, but nothing resolved it. Eventually, she chose a fourth operation: a reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament that lasted two and a half hours. Even with doctors estimating only a 70% chance of returning to professional tennis, she went ahead.

In the eleven years since she first stepped onto the WTA Tour, uninterrupted seasons have been rare. Only 2021 passed without disruption. In a strange testament to her fragility, WTA withdrawal tallies often omit her name simply because injuries had already kept her away from too many events.

Not everyone has met her story with sympathy. Some have nicknamed her “Ana-bulance,” a joke sharpened by fatigue, implying a body so brittle that tournament directors might keep an ambulance idling beyond the baseline.

The debate about her potential has always been intense. Ivanišević’s early prediction may even have been conservative in terms of pure talent. Yet, tennis ability cannot outrun physical limits. Even at her best, Konjuh’s movement and balance were not her main strengths. The contrast was visible in the fourth round of Wimbledon in 2017, where the player moving more comfortably was the 37-year-old Venus Williams.

Konjuh’s game was built instead on rhythm, disguise, and a tyranny of placement, echoes of the styles she admired in Kim Clijsters and Li Na. But in an era that reveres baseline power, she gradually learned that a single thunderbolt cannot replace continuity, patience, and adaptability. At sixteen, eighteen, even twenty, instinct and force were enough. As the tour steepened, she needed to extend the rallies more—one or two more strokes of composure, less firing from the brink, more construction within the point.

The last time I remember watching Konjuh play multiple matches in a single week was at an ITF W75 event in Trnava in 2024, where she defeated fifth seed Océane Dodin in the opening round—a brief flare of her ideal tennis, her talent still glowing even where the body could no longer fully sustain it. In the second round against Czech teenager Dominika Šalková, the struggle returned. After three hard-fought sets, she withdrew. Three months earlier, in the qualifiers of the US Open, the pattern had been the same: she fought fiercely but could not survive three matches in three days. Romanticism cannot rewrite sport. Fitness is the floor; tactical daring rests on trust in the body, something she has been denied for too long.

The Australian Open that followed was the last time she could enter a Grand Slam qualifying with a protected ranking. One final doorway. After that, nothing is assured. She lost in three sets to Sachia Vickery in Round One, visibly exhausted by the third, even as she briefly came back to life in the second.

I still hope Ana reaches one more Grand Slam qualifying draw. I hope the draw is kind. I hope the rallies somehow could lean in her favor. But the truer wish, the one less beholden to prophecy and closer to the texture of a life spent negotiating with the body, is simpler.

That one day she finishes a match smiling, upright, the scoreboard no longer a verdict her body must answer. That tennis grants her a final sentence of her own choosing, where pain is not an unfinished clause but a punctuation mark placed deliberately at the end—because the story, not the injury, decided it was time.

There had been too many narratives pressing on this year’s Doha final between Karolína Muchová and Victoria Mboko before a ball was struck. The two days prior had already supplied their own small dramas, which felt appropriate for a WTA 1000 event missing its usual anchors in the later stages. It was the first tournament at this level since the 2021 Cincinnati Open to feature at least one of Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek, Coco Gauff, Jessica Pegula, and Elena Rybakina in the field, but none in the semifinals, and so the space felt, if not empty, then available.

A more arresting parallel lay further back. Twenty-eight years earlier, another 29-year-old Czech—celebrated for her forward instincts and burdened with the charge of frailty—stood on the brink of the biggest title of her life. That player was Jana Novotná. Across the net that day was Nathalie Tauziat, now Mboko’s coach.

It is easy to find similarities in Muchová’s history of climbs halted just short of the summit with Novotná’s most infamous collapse, the 1993 Wimbledon Championships final against Steffi Graf, where a match she stood a game point from leading 5-1 in the decider dissolved under Centre Court’s weight. By 1998, Novotná would claim her reprieve in a teenager-heavy meta, playing perhaps the most eclectic and efficient tennis of her life. Muchová’s circumstances heading into 2026 possessed no such straight line. Her career has moved like a piecewise function: advance, interruption, return, often traced with a jump discontinuity.

Where do you even begin to make sense of a title like this? I keep returning to the summer of 2024, though I cannot tell whether it was truly the beginning or only the moment when Muchová allowed people to hope again.

By then, she had reached the semifinals of the US Open for the second straight year. As in the previous season, she found herself facing an opponent in New York who had beaten her weeks earlier in Cincinnati. The pattern echoed further back, to Wimbledon in 2021, when she arrived underprepared and comparatively inexperienced, her résumé thinner than those of the other quarterfinalists. Grass was supposed to suit her game, yet outside the gates of the All England Club, her results on the surface were sparse. Until three years later in Eastbourne, her first event after a ten-month wrist layoff, she had not won a tour-level grass match anywhere but Wimbledon.

The record was not quietly mediocre; it was stark. And yet that Wimbledon run unfolded with authority. Muchová lost one set in four rounds and dismissed Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and Paula Badosa in ninety-minute studies of controlled aggression. Warm-up tournaments have rarely predicted her majors.

The 2024 US Open followed a similar arc. Muchová reached the semifinals without dropping a set. There was fortune in the second set against Naomi Osaka, but the more durable impression was technical: reflex volleys struck at full extension, half a step from imbalance. When Osaka tried to push the match to a decider behind her serve, Muchová held. In the tiebreak, she alternated high, looping defense with low, skidding slice, drawing errors not through force but through disturbance. On match point, she forced one more mistake and walked to the net with the contained relief of someone who had executed a plan.

Since returning at the end of June, her serve had increasingly become the hinge. During the first week in New York, her fastest delivery reached 180 km/h—tied for 30th among the women, well below the tournament-leading pace of Coco Gauff. On the men’s side, such speed would barely register.

This is why Chris Evert’s remark that Muchová “plays like a guy from the start of a point” felt slightly clumsy at the time. She does not impose herself through sheer pace in the manner of Petra Kvitová, nor through the blunt physicality of body serves favored by Jeļena Ostapenko. Her serve distribution is unusually even. Wide and down the T appear in near-equal measure, a long-term equilibrium otherwise seen only in Elena Rybakina. The effect is cumulative: nothing asserts itself, yet nothing recurs enough to be trusted. Opponents are denied the comfort of anticipation and kept rigorously honest.

The probabilities clarify what the eye senses. A player winning roughly 71 percent of points on serve holds without facing a break point more than three-quarters of the time. Reduce that success rate by ten percent, the margin that separated her 2024 level from parts of the previous North American hard-court swing, and the probability drops sharply to 56.5 percent. For a player who plays close to the margins by choice, the serve is no longer an ornament.

Her tactical identity has otherwise remained intact. The 2023 French Open final against Iga Świątek distilled it: Muchová advancing, slicing low, forcing volleys; Świątek threading passes under pressure. Even when trailing, Muchová did not retreat into attrition. If her approaches failed, she recommitted. It was a high-variance calculation, but on that clay, trading weight from the baseline would likely have been a slower defeat.

Asked before the 2024 Wimbledon to describe her style, she offered no apologetic defense: “I won’t play another way.”

The matches in New York against Osaka and Anastasia Potapova served as a demonstration. She approached often and with purpose, winning nearly three-quarters of her net points through the first week. Against baseliners and against players comfortable with touch, the pattern held. The numbers resembled her quarterfinal at Roland Garros a year earlier against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, when she won 91 percent of points played inside the baseline.

Conviction, however, has not precluded revision. At the 2023 National Bank Open, she experimented against Świątek, borrowing elements from the forehand-pressing blueprints used by Caroline Garcia, Jessica Pegula, and Jeļena Ostapenko against the then-world No. 1: more direct targeting of the static forehand, with more care along her own diagonal backswing. The adjustments were visible, if incomplete. A fragile second serve and a mistimed return game narrowed the margin that tactics had created.

Some of that progress was, again, undone by another injury-riddled 2025. For the first time in a long while, she also had to accept the absence of Emil Mišek from her box. But she finished the year healthy, which, for her, had never been a trivial detail.

It was a typical Muchová-style start to the 2026 season. She beat tough opponents and ended Elena Rybakina’s 13-match winning streak in Brisbane, moving through the draw with that familiar air of noiseless sabotage. She was still the disruptor, still the assassin. The excitement built, as it always does, until she ran into Coco Gauff.

So when she arrived in Doha at 29, nothing felt entirely new.

Match point.

Ad side.

Second serve.

Muchová’s ball toss rises into a silence so complete it feels arranged. She chooses a semi-kick down the middle. It is neither a dictation nor a stall, but a slightly anxious bluff, the kind of ad-body pocket placement that Aryna Sabalenka saw turned against her to the point of punishment by Madison Keys in the 2025 Australian Open final, where even the slightest predictability was met, twice, with the clarity of return winners. It lands way shorter than intended, generous to anyone who has read it in time.

Mboko steps in and strikes the return cleanly.

For a flicker, Muchová senses the serve has lost its bite. She retreats, almost instinctively, into her backhand corner, the place her body trusts before thought intervenes. It recalls something once said by Jan Stočes, sporting director of the Czech Tennis Federation: their juniors are not sculpted through obsessive repetition of a single stroke or technique, but shaped in matches and improvisation, until certain movements cease to feel learned and begin, instead, to feel like home.

From full stretch, Muchová sends back a backhand of decent depth. Not immaculate, but heavy enough to trouble certainty. Mboko adjusts and carves an inside-out reply with a slight angle toward the forehand corner.

It is a choice logically sound in its geometry.

The ball sails long.

For a heartbeat, the court holds its breath. Muchová raises her hands, then tilts her face to the sky and whispers a yes so soft it belongs only to herself.

I find myself imagining the alternative ending: the ball landing in, and Kaja already sprinting the other way, uncoiling into a forehand pass that kisses the sideline. Part of me would like to think she is actually favored to win the point from there, even as a low-percentage shot from a position most would struggle to defend; it is just, after so many luminous trials that slipped at their edges in a more or less disappointing way, she is spared for this execution she knows how to complete by heart. Chance, so often indifferent, holds steady for once and does not let this single permutation pass her by.

This piece is dedicated to Damian Kust, tennis journalist, podcaster, and distinguished ATP Challenger connoisseur, who died in January at the age of 26. Few championed the sport beyond its brightest stages with such diligence, discernment, and open-mindedness. Through his reporting on the Challenger circuit, he gave enduring form to stories and careers that might otherwise have passed unrecorded. Tennis has lost not only a journalist, but one of its most caring custodians.

The office is quiet, but the noise inside my head is deafening. It is one of those heavy, stagnant Wednesdays where the air feels like iron. I look out the window, convinced it is a washout, watching the world blur through the glass.

All I can think about is my friend.

And then I start to shake. It is a strange thing when your body decides to go on strike; my hands feel like they belong to a stranger. I have to close my eyes and take a deep breath just to process the single action of picking up an empty water bottle. The sounds of my surroundings fade into a dull, underwater drone. I try to pull air into my lungs, but the rhythm is gone. My chest has forgotten the sequence.

When the floor falls out from under us, it is our instinct to reach for the familiar. I pull out my phones and set up split screens, streaming tennis matches, hoping the back-and-forth of a baseline rally can help me compartmentalize, even if only for a quick break. But my hands are so slick with sweat the screens won’t react to my touch. Of course, opening another app is harder. My social feeds are already a mosaic of tributes. Every one of them is so beautifully written. Heartbreaking words.

The slow retreat over recent months is visible now. I notice Damian’s updates getting shorter—the frantic live-tweeting fading into one or two posts a day, then a single weekly recap of the titles, and finally, long silence. Then comes the news of the liver transplant, the whispers that he is struggling immensely, the dire state of his health and spirit. But death? It isn’t in the bracket. It isn’t supposed to be part of the tournament.

Stares. Long stares at the screens. And that’s when I see it. The sport that has always felt so vibrant, so communal, so rich with inference and shared passion, is flattened. It is as if someone has turned a dial and drained the color out of the world. The game is suddenly in grayscale.

Tennis is a spectator sport. I have always felt that way, in the sense that what it gives you matters more than what is objectively happening on court. But at this moment, I feel it goes even further, that it is less about the yellow ball or the lines and more about the bridge between many of us. The community we share. The way we can obsess over tiny details, talk for hours, and chase conversations until sunrise in the other’s timezone. I don’t just love or mourn a sport. I love and mourn the people who give it meaning. The people who make it ours.

You probably already know I have never been an earnest follower of the men’s tour, so naturally, most of what I pick up comes from Damian. For a long time, it sits shallow in my mind: facts noted, but not absorbed. I wish now I were taking more of it in, so when our conversations drop into the sport’s deeper, messier, and sometimes inexpressible corners, I could actually meet him there instead of just nodding along. But it is never really about the facts. It is the instinct behind them.

As he hunts the overlooked parts of the circuit with devotional curiosity to carve out space for the beautifully stubborn grinders and qualifiers who serve as his protagonists, I recognize the odd symmetry in his earnest contextualization of these unsung heroes, as that shared concept was offered to me long before we met and has been forming our deepest sense of connection.

I start scrolling through the mental archives. I miss our conversations about the Bella Cup, the small, defunct women’s tournament not far from his hometown, spoken of with such nostalgia, and a place where future legends were once just unknowns with dreams.

I miss the imaginary tennis itineraries we draw up across Europe and both sides of the Pacific. Trips we know we’ll probably never take, but love to map out anyway.

I miss our “Spot Damian” game. I’d scan the crowds of live broadcasts for events he attends in person, squinting at the stands, trying to find his face in a sea of thousands. I never managed to score a single point in that game. And now, the futility of it weighs increasingly heavily in my heart.

I even miss the bickering. The disagreements we had over the most trivial and completely asinine things now feel massive (Sorry, Damian, but makaron z truskawkami still remains a hard no). Those tiny moments have expanded to fill every empty space in my mind.

The rain stopped. Lunchtime. “Gorgeous day, isn’t it?” a colleague suggests a walk.

I look outside. It is bone dry. It didn’t rain at all. It was all my tears.

It snuck up on me: the last book I finished reading this year turned out to be the best. Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton’s memoir about rescuing a wild leveret during lockdown, is ostensibly the story of a tiny creature with soft ears and a heartbeat like a trapped metronome. But really, it is about the delicate, counterintuitive art of loosening your grip on the world. Burnt out from politics, Dalton finds the hare in the grass one day and, almost without meaning to, reorganizes her life around its wildness. She lets the garden overgrow, cracks the windows open, tiptoes through her own home so the animal can sleep. She refuses to name it or tame it, tending instead to her own instinct to control. In her company, the hare remains what it is: uncatchable, sometimes even unidentifiable, and almost always mythic. She learns slowly to practice a kind of reverent restraint.

The leveret would invite me to chase it, by coming close and jumping playfully. Then it would accelerate away from me, change direction mid-stride, and zoom back tantalisingly close before pulling away again, showing off its dazzling fleetness…It would race in this way for minutes on end, effortlessly running circles around me. At a certain point it would abruptly stop and return nonchalantly to cropping the grass, barely out of breath…

Somewhere in the tale of devotion, I began thinking about Emerson Jones. Maybe it was the hare imagery; maybe it was the feeling of watching something young and electric test the edges of its freedom. When Emerson runs down a ball, zigzagging across the baseline with that springy lightness, she resembles a creature that refuses domestication, a force powered by the same mysterious current that once animated the Energizer Bunny, the pink rabbit that kept pounding its drum until the drum cracked. Someone online joked that maybe overvoltage isn’t good for the poor thing. I laughed, but part of me tucked the line away: in electrical engineering, overvoltage is a failure by exceeding the system’s intended limit. In human terms, it is the thin membrane between creation and destruction.

Emerson has been cast as the next big force in Australian tennis, and her rise has the feel of something kinetic, almost inevitable. Born on the Gold Coast to an elite athletic lineage—her father, Brad Jones, a QAFL star, and her mother, Loretta Harrop, an Olympic silver medalist triathlete—Emerson is genetically and environmentally predisposed to the high-performance ecosystem.

She climbed to junior world No. 1 at fifteen and became the first Australian girl to do so since Jelena Dokic in 1998. Her game is bold and pressing-centric, the kind of ball-striking that comes out hot from the first swing and makes crowds lean forward. In the 2024 Australian Open girls’ final, she raced to a 4–1 lead before the match slipped away. At Wimbledon that year, she reached another final; again, the trophy went to someone else. And yet she absorbed those defeats with a poise that felt almost otherworldly. She smiled at the crowd, congratulated her opponents, said she was simply grateful to be on Rod Laver Arena and AELTC at all. There was no bitterness, only a strange, hare-like calm, as if she already understood that the wild path unfurls at its own pace, and forcing anything only spooks the moment.

Reading Dalton, I kept returning to her central contradiction: that loving a wild thing means stepping back. Dalton opens her home to weather and insects, stripping away scents and routines until her house smells faintly like digestive biscuits—the unique, domestic scent of hares. She shrinks her own presence so the animal can live without fear. This borders on absurd. But she does it because devotion often looks absurd from the outside.

This architecture of sanctuary is reflected in the way the Jones family has structured Emerson’s life. To support her training at the Queensland Tennis Centre, they built a townhouse in Brisbane to reduce her commute. Yet, they maintain a “form,” the leporine term for a grassy nest. Hares, unlike rabbits, do not hide in burrows; they live in the open, relying on camouflage and sudden bursts of speed.

Emerson’s “form” is sharper, more fluorescent, but not entirely different. You sense the rituals threading her days—an athlete’s monasticism. Early practices, long recovery sessions, the pared-down life that protects the spark. Coached by David Taylor, she carries herself with a steadiness that belies her age. Off court, she is, by her own account, a homebody. She likes being around her family. She likes surfing on the Gold Coast and celebrating milestones with pistachio gelato. You can imagine her slipping on bunny slippers after a brutal practice.

Dalton’s hare teaches her the necessity of surrender. There is a speculative magic in the hare that science cannot fully capture. In Irish and Scottish folklore, hares were divine shapeshifters, often believed to be witches in disguise. They were invulnerable to lead bullets, only to be stopped by a silver coin. This elusiveness is the ultimate performance strategy.

Consider the Mad March Hare. The famous boxing behavior was long thought to be males fighting for dominance. We now know it is actually the female hare striking out at a suitor to test his stamina. It is a qualifying round of the most brutal sort. Tennis teaches the same lesson in its own punishing way. You can train your body into a machine, but you cannot force a match to obey. Often, the harder you press, the more the game flutters away. The best players relax their hold on outcome. They yield the wheel to a fluency earned in isolation, to the repetitions that refine instinct into reflex. After her losses, Emerson talked about “enjoying every point.” It sounded simple, but simple things are often the hardest. It echoed Dalton’s realization that gentleness, offered inward, offered to the fleeting present, creates room for something real to unfold.

Perspective is the memoir’s other gift. Dalton learns to see through the hare’s eyes, to understand the vulnerability of a creature that sleeps with one ear cocked for danger. When I try to see through Emerson’s eyes, I imagine the vastness of a Grand Slam stadium as a teenager: the lights, the noise, the pressure blooming in the ribs. She looks composed, but I suspect her heart thunders like a hare fleeing across a moonlit field. Both the athlete and the animal must navigate a world far larger than their bodies.

And still they run.

Which brings it back to the Energizer Bunny metaphor, the drum that eventually splinters under relentless pounding. Even devotion, Dalton realizes, can become too much. Even a hare needs darkness and quiet. Likewise, Emerson seems to grasp this instinctively. She has the drive to train every spare minute, but she also has the sense to unplug, to date someone, to be seventeen. Maybe that is her way of lowering the voltage before the drum breaks. Maybe that is the ultimate secret of the hare: to be “born with eyes open” (unlike the blind kits of a rabbit) and yet to know exactly when to close them to the world.

Raising Hare ends with release: Dalton opens the gate and watches the grown hare vanish into the fields. The moment is painful and beautiful. Something leaves her. Something steadier takes root. Her grip on the world shifts.

Watching Emerson, I feel a similar mix of tenderness and awe. She is already sprinting ahead—brave, tireless, a little wild. She has tasted the ache of almost winning and the rush of nearly being there. I like to imagine her bounding into her future the way a hare bolts from tall grass. And I will keep cheering, the way Dalton tiptoed through her home, careful not to disturb the running of a race only a hare could truly understand.

3/4

Iga Świątek is chasing a career Grand Slam, aiming to become just the 11th woman ever—and seventh in the Open Era—to do so. If she succeeds at this Australian Open, it will have taken 28 Grand Slam main draws, placing her as the third fastest among the Open Era greats1: Steffi Graf (17), Serena Williams (18), Martina Navratilova (32), Chris Evert (33), and Maria Sharapova (36).

Still, every grand conquest has to start somewhere, and the six-time major champion is no stranger to winning the first round at the competition. The Pole is in a league of her own with the active streak of 24 Grand Slam main draw appearances with a win, twice as many as second-ranked Elena Rybakina (12).

6

Aryna Sabalenka has reached six consecutive hard-court Grand Slam finals. One more would tie the Open Era record held by Steffi Graf and Martina Hingis (seven each). A final in Melbourne would also make Sabalenka only the third woman in the Open Era to reach at least four straight Australian Open finals, after Evonne Goolagong (1971–1976) and Hingis (1997–2002). You could probably spot that these streaks would be spaced exactly 26 years apart.

0

Sabalenka’s record at the season’s first major might have been more imposing had she not suffered from the so-called Brisbane curse. Since the tournament’s inception in 2009, no Brisbane champion has gone on to win that year’s Australian Open. Their results are as follows:

R4, R3, QF, R2, QF, R4, F, QF, QF, QF, SF, R3, R2, F

A milder variant of this anomaly appears to afflict the WTA Finals champion. For seven consecutive seasons, the year-end championship titleholder has failed to reach the final of the following Australian Open. Curiously, WTA Finals runner-ups have marginally outperformed the champions this century in terms of strike rate at the next season’s opening major, claiming six Australian Open titles to the champions’ five.

11

In the last two majors, Iga Świątek and Aryna Sabalenka both logged their 100th Grand Slam win in the championship match itself. The closest active player to follow suit is Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, but at 97 wins, she is unlikely to enjoy the same symmetry, unless she somehow manages to find four walkovers before taking the final.

The 34-year-old veteran is nevertheless on the verge of another milestone: with 49 hard-court Grand Slam wins, she is poised to become the ninth active player to reach the 50-win mark, joining Venus Williams (133), Victoria Azarenka (100), Caroline Wozniacki (81), Madison Keys (67), Aryna Sabalenka (62), Karolína Plíšková (56), Naomi Osaka (54), and Elina Svitolina (53). And if world No. 11 feels slightly ungenerous as her career-high ranking, she may yet find compensation in the pursuit of a more flattering side of the same number: her 11th Grand Slam quarterfinal.

Top 10

It’s still somewhat surprising to me that no player has yet registered Top 10 wins at all four Slams this decade. Elena Rybakina came close, arriving at this year’s US Open with a chance to be the first, only to be stopped cold by Markéta Vondroušová in the Round of 16, falling short of reaching the quarterfinal that would have pitched her against the world No. 1. The opportunity now shifts to Barbora Krejčíková alone at this Australian Open, although her hard-court Slam record against the Top 10 (1–4) isn’t exactly encouraging.

No. 1

Let’s raise the bar higher. This century, only four players have beaten the world No. 1 at both hard-court Slams: Serena Williams, Justine Henin, Maria Sharapova, and CoCo Vandeweghe.

One of Jessica Pegula, Belinda Bencic, Jeļena Ostapenko, and Karolína Plíšková could become the fifth if they topple Aryna Sabalenka. The numbers underline the task: Sabalenka is 17–7 against this quartet (with Pegula accounting for much of the positive differential), including 5-1 at the Slams. Based on the current seedings, the defending finalist could even face all of them in succession.

4

Four Australians—Maya Joint, Daria Kasatkina, Ajla Tomljanovic, and Kimberly Birrell—are direct acceptances into their home Slam. It may not sound like a groundswell, but by recent standards it is progress: at last edition’s initial Australian Open main draw cutoff, Olivia Gadecki was the lone local presence, with four others clustering in the No. 105–120 range.

Results for Aussies in Melbourne have been sparse of late. Remove Ashleigh Barty from the equation, and the last second-week appearance dates back to Daria Saville (then Gavrilova) in 2017. Even third rounds have been hard to come by: since Barty’s retirement, only Storm Hunter has reached that stage (as a qualifier in 2024)2. On paper, another third-round appearance seems reachable this year, though it’s possible none of them will enjoy the safety net of a seed (Joint, the Australian WTA No. 1, is currently ranked precisely No. 32).

2000s

Of the 108 direct acceptances and wild cards confirmed for this Australian Open, 56 players were born in the 2000s. This gives the tournament a genuine shot to become the first Grand Slam where at least half of the women’s singles field is made up of players born in the 2000s. The previous high was the 2025 US Open, filling 60 of 128.

10+

A new Grand Slam season also ushers in the chaos and charm of Slam qualifying, one of the most hectic and serendipitous stretches of the tennis calendar. In 2025, Veronika Erjavec emerged as the undeniable star of qualifying: she reached the final qualifying round at every Slam and was among ten players to make multiple Slam main draws, racking up a field-leading ten wins in total.

Still, she wasn’t quite rewriting the record books. Four women this decade posted more Slam qualifying wins in a single year: Yuliia Starodubtseva (12 in 2024), Eva Lys (11 in 2024), Greet Minnen (11 in 2021), and Ana Konjuh (11 in 2021). Hitting double-digit wins in a year is no small feat. It requires remarkable consistency across surfaces over a three- or four-day window and against a variety of playing styles, while staying in a ranking range that usually makes a bigger breakthrough seem inevitable. That’s what made Starodubtseva’s calendar Slam qualifying campaign so singular. But who knows? Maybe someone new will join the ODU legend this year.

43%

Well, one familiar name will certainly be missing from the Slam qualifying scene, at least in January—but for good reason. Since her 2022 Wimbledon debut, Sára Bejlek will, for the first time, bypass qualifying to secure a place in the main draw. Until the last major, she had converted 6 of 12 qualifying attempts and, remarkably, accounted for 43% of Czech women’s Slam main draw qualifications during that period, with her compatriots combined managing just 8 from 54.

2008

Since 2024, players from the Class of 2008 have featured in every girls’ singles and doubles final. The incoming season marks their last at the junior Slams, and they are well placed to extend that run. But many of them are already aiming for further, and like tireless streams, pressing forward without pause. Red dirt, pristine grass, and cities along the banks neither slow their course nor divert their gaze, as the course is set toward a single horizon that is the open sea of the professional tour, and seven of them are currently inside the WTA Top 300.

To me, what distinguishes this soon-to-graduate junior class is its balance. The headline singles strength is matched by an unusually deep doubles group—perhaps premature to label them specialists, but too substantial to be relegated to a footnote.

This list excludes Sinja KRAUS, whose chances of not making the Top 100 even before the start of 2026 are considered trivial at the time of writing.

Credit to Damian Kust for the original idea1.

Alina KORNEEVA (RUS)

Another injury-disrupted year, thrown off from the very first match of Australian Open qualifying with no warm-ups, then a long, stuttering restart that only truly began in June—her story hardly needs retelling. A tennis parent (of someone I’ll mention later) once said the comeback is always stronger than the setback, and that strength is drawn from the belief that a dormant spring still yields to summer. As long as she’s breathing and hasn’t made it yet, she remains on any serious watchlist.

Nikola BARTŮŇKOVÁ (CZE)

By definition, few have endured a more intrusive interruption than her six-month suspension, yet she has patched up the tires and resumed her climb, steering herself back well within the Slam-qualifying range. The Muchová parallels can wait, but her near-compulsion to meet the ball early is unmistakable. Stamina has been a fickle companion this season, and that alliance should only strengthen with a clean slate next year.

Joanna GARLAND (TPE)

We aren’t exactly short of absurdly long ITF winning streaks in recent years, but hers always felt portable to a higher level, which first materialized during her Roland Garros qualifying run, where she finally showed how deliberately she can script points off her serve. She’s confusingly good in all the right ways, and the intangibles are catching up fast. Whether she follows the trajectories of Tjen or Ćirić Bagarić is unclear; she may be writing an entirely different storyline of her own.

Leyre ROMERO GORMAZ (ESP)

One of the few old-school clay-courters left, she remains very much a surface specialist for now. Clay grants her the time to build points and showcase a highly calibrated touch, and the disguised approach drop shot in particular is a signature. But what reads as craft on clay can become over-embellishment on faster surfaces, where she lacks the luxury to reset rhythms.

Emerson JONES (AUS)

An early Top 100 push next season hinged on putting together a decent fall swing, and she did more than that. I’ve always liked the shape of her backhand, with its extended take-back, enough to believe it could hold up as she settles into the Tour, but not so much that it’s beyond refinement, particularly in protecting that side when deuce-side serves get picked off in the reverse corner. But perhaps that’s an overly deterministic mapping for the youngest player in the Top 200.

Lanlana TARARUDEE (THA)

Low-variance, elastic in coverage, and armed with a sneaky, burst-heavy backhand, she has made genuine progress on clay, her least favorite surface, despite the results lagging behind. Slam qualifying has been a frustrating frontier so far, though her pace should run counter to the meta. Once she breaks that barrier, a ranking spike might not be far behind.

Dominika ŠALKOVÁ (CZE)

The navel-gazing side of me keeps replaying that Australian Open qualifying heartbreaker—up 7–3 in the match tiebreak against Chwalińska, and somehow it slipped. She remains flawless in finals (7–0) and among the most efficient break-point generators in her tier, but margins like that rarely hold forever. A sturdier fallback pattern would spare her the scramble of improvising creative fixes. Last year, I likened her to a Liverpool-in-transition buildup, flirting with chaos as a strategy; the attempted Wirtz-customized shift toward zonal control at the expense of counter-pressing hasn’t fully materialized on the court.

Petra MARČINKO (CRO)

Another late-round liftoff artist (10–2 in finals). It feels fortunate I can still list her after leaving her off last year, considering how often she hovered near a breakthrough in 2025. She has a practiced, almost choreographed touch on recovery shots, particularly defending down-the-line, which helps maintain a strong record against lefties. Likewise, the between-the-legs pre-serve ritual feels like another mental rehearsal of settling into the moment. The sticking point remains the clutch factor in matches she “should” win, but she’s hardly alone in that struggle.

Tiantsoa Sarah RAKOTOMANGA RAJAONAH (FRA)

She has made impactful strides since Roland Garros last year, with those efforts first crystallizing in the spring across indoor events on two surfaces. A more compact backhand take-back and noticeably sharper lateral movement pair well with the natural topspin of her lefty forehand and dependable serve. That said, the pick still feels very opportunistic off her São Paulo title points.

Talia GIBSON (AUS)

She’s so close that it will be harder not to get in. But I felt the same last year, having passed on her, unconvinced she could unlock the extra bit of energy outside her comfort zone like the way she did Down Under. Then again, I’m not sure the technical improvements this season fully justify the Top 100 vicinity her points situation implies. Sometimes these judgments do feel more cyclical than purely deductive.

Victoria JIMÉNEZ KASINTSEVA (AND)

The rough edges still show when moments in her matches are spaced out, and the flow between them feels disjointed. When everything clicks, the upside is scary, but to achieve that, she still needs to sharpen basically every tool in her box. There’s also the lingering concern that she rarely strings two good weeks together, leaving us guessing between “she is onto something” or “she didn’t even show up”. Still, every misfire would be a terrible thing to waste, and the game rewards those who learn, even if the lessons arrive as bruises rather than trophies.

Lucie HAVLÍČKOVÁ (CZE)

Another former junior world No. 1 whose transition to the pros has been anything but linear. I appreciate her return after a mental sabbatical—maybe too gifted to stay behind a café counter, though that time away clearly gave her perspective—and easing back into the sport with psychological support integrated into the rebuild. Her comeback has comfortably surpassed expectations so far, aside from leftover volatility on the court. It’s reductive to label this purely as something mental, as if mind and mechanics were neatly separable in the Cartesian sense. I’ve often thought Nosková’s serve stands as the finest singular asset among the Class of 2004; the disguise and variation are still lacking except the ad-T, but it already makes a persuasive case for hers to rival the best of 2005.

Lola RADIVOJEVIĆ (SRB)

I can’t yet get a panoramic read on her, but the growth over the last 15 months is palpable after an almost equally long period of stagnation. There’s a persistent Serbian pattern in the last decade that meteoric juniors or early-pro surges fade just as fast. Her static attribute feels so sufficiently well-built that entering the Top 100 by 21, in an offbeat season, would neither confirm nor contradict the trend.

Lilli TAGGER (AUT)

There are always caveats when juniors are scheduled to crack the Top 100, but her sustainable rise on clay is exactly the trajectory you want to see. The skepticism around her one-handed backhand felt a bit overblown, if juxtaposed with the pace-defining firepower of her serve and forehand that consistently put her in control and forced the opponents to react on her terms first. Honestly, the backhand might not ever be a primary concern until she becomes a Tour regular; it was more about how she responds to, say, a Kraus-style “poach” (a nemesis this year) or navigates those critical end-game moments where one shot, or one misread, decides everything. So far, she has answered most of those questions.

Darja VIDMANOVÁ (CZE)

By Parsons-Gruskin nomenclature, she has chiseled her likeness onto the Mount Rushmore of contemporary NCAA women’s tennis—a statue owed not only to the rarity of the Triple Crown, though that alone would suffice, but also to the sheer expanse of her evolution. When she won Punta Cana last year, her court coverage still relied on the reach of her wingspan, often dragging her into suboptimal contact points and ungainly mechanics. Yet I am no longer convinced that they are flaws, even when viewed through the most aesthetic of lenses.

Mary STOIANA (USA)

Going against the grain here and backing her alongside Vidmanová as they write the next chapter of their NCAA rivalry, which has already spilled into pro three times. She is clearly the less stable matchup-wise, with fewer 50-50s across the board, so this is buying into the upside, but I love her swingy, hybrid rhythm and ability to float. The shot selection off slices after charging forward can be baffling (a classic Muchová-Parry syndrome), and her second serves are often telegraphed, but every match since the start of her Aggie days keeps pulling me back in.

Carson BRANSTINE (CAN)

Surely you don’t mind yet another NCAA entrant with a rare blend of chutzpah and intellectual curiosity on the court, which is likely what drives her to shape points rather than overpower them from the get-go, and what she reinforces each time positively when it pays off. She’s quick off the mark and has a forehand volley capable of keeping the ball teasingly low despite her height. For now, she’s fun to watch because she chooses conflict; in time, she’ll need to choose her conflicts more wisely.

Laura SAMSON (CZE)

Her transition to pro and the 2025 season overall impressed me more than the 2024 campaign, even without a Prague semifinal to anchor the résumé. She’s increased her first-serve percentage quite a bit without sacrificing too much of its effectiveness, a trade-off that really makes sense with the rest of her game. Physically, it still takes a leap of faith to group her with full-fledged ITF staples, but she has been evolving into one of the most resourceful defenders at both corners, and the “one of” qualifier may not survive for long.

WEI Sijia (CHN)

She didn’t really get a fair run after the mid-year injury layoff, so her reset following the Asian swing counts as a modest step forward. Skipping the National Games (given she had no provincial team to represent) might even be a blessing in disguise for ranking purposes. I’m picking up hints that she has been overcompensating in a few areas and trying very hard to make things click. The burning question is whether she has enough late-game identity to close and preserve herself to achieve it reliably across a four-to-five-day tournament.

Marina STAKUSIC (CAN)

She has faded a little into the background these past two seasons in what has felt like a long shadow of that thrilling 2023 summer–fall stretch, but I still really like her. It is hard not to like someone who, with the refined sensibility to (correctly) identify Rybakina as her model for groundstroke purity, clearly sees the game. I also like that she is back with Bolvina, stripping things to the basics again. But defending her as a future constant feels increasingly like arguing with gravity. Will she be a very good player? Yes. One of the best of her generation? I have my doubts. Until she convinces herself that her shot-making and movement belong in the same sentence, each of them carrying intent, it’s just so difficult to override the confidence conundrum and build a priori conviction. While for a decent amount of opposition, her end games may carry her without needing to worry about the backswing, a few more follow-up runs wouldn’t hurt. And that’s before even getting into the serve.

Kaitlin QUEVEDO (ESP)

If she keeps her schedule and health in check, she could become a hard-court staple and occasionally spring a surprise on clay when the draw helps. Since switching to Spain and training in Barcelona, she has developed an even more “Spanish” game—more punch with added topspin that neatly wraps the ball, her inverse diagonal lines reminiscent of Spanish-flavored Zheng and Bouzas Maneiro. But there’s also some urgency on the more vulnerable backhand that can be rushed out of proportion. She probably isn’t bet-against-the-house explosive, but could definitely make life awkward for higher seeds in a tournament.

Hanne VANDEWINKEL (BEL)

Early drafts of this list included three Belgians. Costoulas and Vandromme rotated in and out, but she’s never left since the early clay swing, when I first started taking a broader look at the next season. I’m drawn to both the intention and execution of her slices, even if they often stall the point just enough to work in her favor anyway; that could change as she runs into more direct targeting on the Tour.

Teodora KOSTOVIĆ (SRB)

The Ristić pick last year didn’t get anywhere, so let’s try another feisty Serbian. She has all the makings of a cult sensation with the underarm serves, reverse backhand volley shenanigans, and top-of-lung screams—the little shocks remind you that tennis is, at its essence, a spectator sport. That said, if there’s anyone on this list whose tennis gives me the same feeling as that secret indie restaurant I selfishly hope never gets overexposed (and thus overcrowded), it has to be the one and only Teo.

GUO Hanyu (CHN)

Another highly speculative pick, and whether it works out or not, it will be interesting to see how she manages her singles schedule after predominantly prioritizing doubles in recent memories and making a gradual shift in 2025. She has been hovering around the Top 120-130 level for a while, having played an entertaining (and loose) brand of tennis that might seem on the brink of collapsing as the match progresses, but her 18–9 deciding-set record this year doesn’t agree.

Linda KLIMOVIČOVÁ (POL)

It has been impossible to watch the once-favorite Linda with any emotional attachment after the Decision, and bringing in Miške even on a trial reads like a cruel inside joke. Hopefully, Warsaw offers more to frame in her selfies than Prague ever did.

Maja CHWALIŃSKA (POL)

The last fodder feels like the probabilistic equivalent of these Grand Slam bracket challenges, where you have no standout in a section and default to Khachanov—never flashy, but always honest work. She should benefit from the increasingly clay-heavy WTA 125 meta and is conditionally stable beyond just clay, making her an odds-on favorite for eventually becoming a Top 100 player, but hard to pin down for any particular year. It would feel wildly off-key if she were, in a few years, remembered only for that 2016 junior Fed Cup title and a cameo role in Świątek’s biography.

If there is anything I have taken from my high school French classes, it is the ability to sense, almost instinctively, the Frenchness of a name. I owe this to my teacher, a woman who had spent nearly half her life in France and spoke as if summoning names from a Parisian address book. Her example sentences improvised to illustrate some new rule of grammar were filled with names. They were as much part of the language as the verbs we conjugated or the tenses we conveyed.

So the name Capucine Jauffret struck me as unmistakably French from the start. This was actually before I learned that her grandfather, François Jauffret, had been a two-time Roland-Garros semi-finalist who once pushed Björn Borg to five sets in the 1976 edition, his name imprinted into the annals of French tennis. I guess it is the sound of Jauffret (ZHO-FREH) that gave it away. It lingers in the air, the final consonant withheld, as if the letters before lean in to whisper something. That restraint is part of what makes it beautiful.

And yet, it is irritating to hear an umpire call out, “Game, JAW-FRET,” anglicizing the name into something blunt and graceless. The last time I heard it pronounced correctly was at, unironically, Les Petits As, the junior tournament held in Tarbes. Countless times, I have wanted to correct these umpires, to lecture on the essence of French, partly reciting what I had learned in school: how French sounds drift and evolve over time, while spelling remains unchanged from the past and unmoved by the words its people speak.

All of this stops when Jauffret herself in an English interview suggested she didn’t feel entirely comfortable enforcing the French.

It didn’t take long to see that keeping my original name wouldn’t help me fit in. On the first day, the teacher moved around the room, handing out name tags as students offered theirs. When it was my turn, I spelled out P-A-T-R-I-C-K, and pronounced it as I would always have in English. It landed awkwardly amidst the adopted Jean-Pierres and Louises, which slid easily into the French preface of the textbook. It wasn’t just phonetic awkwardness, but the suspicion that your own identity does not fully translate, that something essential in you becomes slightly misaligned when placed in another tongue. I learned my first lesson before the class had even begun: the teacher demonstrated the proper way—PAH–TʁIK, with that signature guttural r.

This is the bilingual’s tightrope, and I experienced it learning a third language through my second. I imagine it is true also in Jauffret’s case of subtractive bilingualism, the kind in which acquiring one language can subtly erode the grounding of another: You bend yourself, sometimes unconsciously, to meet the language where it stands, masking little discomfort so you can pass through its gates unchallenged. Often in the French class, mid-sentence, when I reach for a word, nothing quite gives way to what I want to say. English allows me to circle around, borrowing whatever comes close enough to eventually arriving at the idea, or at least its asymptote. It lets me roam. It permits detours. It forgives the mess.

As I continued to study French and Latin over the years (both accompanied me as an undergraduate), their texture has softened. It has shifted from a structure of challenge to a terrain of welcome. For every English word that slips from my mind, there is a French word I miss with a startling ache once I’m away. The two languages now exist together in a delicate tension, like light and shadow sharing a room—merging, parting, always defining the space between them.

Jauffret, still a junior, plays what I think of as adorable tennis. Not everyone sees it. I remember watching her in person in SoCal, and an overambitious thirteen-year-old next to me muttered to what I assume was his equally overambitious tennis parent, likely having finished his own matches and wandering the courts, “The girls can’t finish the points.” Likewise, in a UTR footage of Jauffret facing Ema Burgić, a comment questioned whether the players were too defensive, as if a game without prize money couldn’t matter. But I was almost glad she didn’t rush. There’s such a high degree of freedom in tennis that the point rewards in more ways than just hitting clean winners.

In certain moments, when sound and motion align, you could sense the symmetry between word and stroke, between inheritance and desire. As Jauffret held serve again, the umpire letting fly that unforgivable JAW-FRET, my thoughts hovered between the two tongues, suspended in the switch from one to another. Life suddenly felt like the ball Jauffret’s opponent sent across the net, one that could at any second deviate from its purpose, revealing itself as a game of initiation, absorption and redirection. To speak yourself well is to live well and rally well: to meet force with touch, to let the pace quicken without panic, to return what comes with conviction if not certainty. It’s an autonomy born not out of partition but of weaving all that has been bequeathed into the fabric of a self, lodged between where it came from and where it is carried next.

Perhaps that is all a name ever is—something realized fully in its provisionality.

The WTA’s award season is rarely a mirror—it’s more of a funhouse reflection, warped by selective logic and administrative amnesia. What began as a celebration of growth and resilience has, over the years, become a curious mix of performative consistency, statistical laziness, and the occasional “how did she get here?” moment. In 2023, for instance, Markéta Vondroušová was nominated for both Player of the Year and Best Comeback, breaking a long-standing, if implicit, convention that a player should not appear in multiple categories. The following year brought further confusion: most categories were reduced from six to five nominees, Jasmine Paolini was curiously omitted from Most Improved Player, and no shortlist was released for Best Coach.

Perhaps it’s a little sanctimonious to care this much. But if the past is any guide, the only thing reliably consistent about these awards is how spectacularly inconsistent they manage to be.

Enough preamble.

The lists are ranked in descending order of nomination likelihood unless otherwise indicated.

Player of the Year

Ballot:

• Aryna SABALENKA

• Iga ŚWIĄTEK

• Coco GAUFF

• Amanda ANISIMOVA

• Madison KEYS

This category, in many respects, is self-evident, and results speak for themselves. The only meaningful debate may be whether Madison Keys or Mirra Andreeva deserves the fifth nomination. It’s worth emphasizing upfront that a Grand Slam title does not guarantee a spot on the ballot, as last year’s Barbora Krejčíková experience reminds us. To eclipse a Slam winner, a contender must demonstrate a materially stronger season overall.

I tentatively place Keys in this slot because she satisfies several objective benchmarks: qualification for the WTA Finals, a Grand Slam title, and a higher year-end ranking than Andreeva, whose strongest argument rests on her WTA 1000 performance—22–7 with two titles versus Keys’s 14–6. Andreeva’s season-long consistency is slightly more sustained, though her post–Wimbledon form dipped. In terms of overall consistency, the comparison is razor-close: Andreeva posts a 40–16 record (13–4 in Slams) to Keys’s 37–14 (13–3 in Slams). Andreeva narrowly leads in Top 10 wins (6–5) but trails in Top 20 victories (7–10). Ultimately, the two are almost inseparable. In such tight cases, it is not unreasonable to think that Keys’s Grand Slam, the sport’s defining measure, tips the balance.

It’s also worth tempering the common narrative around Andreeva. Framing her as having “thrown” her WTA Finals chances oversimplifies her season. Attempts to extend the narrative of disappointment beyond the year’s second half, casting her Slam losses in deep rounds as squandered opportunities, ignore the context of the matches themselves. While her loss to Boisson could plausibly reflect emotional volatility, defeats to Bencic at Wimbledon and Townsend at the U.S. Open were less about missed opportunities and more about being tactically outmaneuvered. Both matches underscore that Andreeva remains rushable on both ends of returns (albeit in two different ways, one arguably more inimitable than the other).

Similarly, the claim that Andreeva “deserves” the Finals over Elena Rybakina reads as heavily hindsight-biased. By the same logic, one could argue that Rybakina herself “threw” the Dubai semifinal, surrendering an 870-point swing in Race points. Hypothetical what-ifs are entertaining but ultimately irrelevant once results are set in stone.

I don’t think Rybakina is in the conversation even putting aside the tension with the WTA, which is no longer (and one might argue has never been) an undercurrent.

Most Improved Player

Ballot:

• Mirra ANDREEVA

• Clara TAUSON

• Ekaterina ALEXANDROVA

• McCartney KESSLER

• Linda NOSKOVÁ

Next In:

• Ann LI

• Jaqueline CRISTIAN

• Hailey BAPTISTE

• Jéssica BOUZAS MANEIRO

I would personally weigh both the mutations and the consistencies in a player’s development, rather than default to the neat arithmetic of a ranking rise born from the fortuitous clustering of a few standout results. The WTA’s reliance on ranking as a proxy for progress is understandable in its convenience, but it risks flattening nuance into a single number, hardly the most reliable gauge of developmental breadth or depth.

Danielle Collins’s nomination last year was mind-boggling. Her candidacy felt more like a festschrift, given her prior résumé, and the season itself was defined by extremes: a blistering 22–3 stretch from Miami to Strasbourg stood in sharp, almost jarring contrast with the surrounding inconsistency. By that same logic, it is difficult to see why Donna Vekić wasn’t nominated (and like Collins, had highlight seasons and reached career-high ranking a while ago) or why Yulia Putintseva was passed over where her season was built less on volatility and more on steady advances at bigger stages, punctuated by a set of career milestones that, taken together, offered a more durable narrative of growth (although that would not last to this year).

Best Newcomer

Ballot:

• Victoria MBOKO

• Loïs BOISSON

• Maya JOINT

• Iva JOVIC

• Alexandra EALA

Next In:

• Eva LYS

• Janice TJEN

• Emiliana ARANGO

• Tereza VALENTOVÁ

The WTA once showed a clear soft spot for first-time Tour titlists in this category, but that tradition seemed to vanish last year, when Erika Andreeva somehow ranked ahead of McCartney Kessler and Suzan Lamens. Even now, it’s difficult to argue that the Russian deserves to stand meaningfully above Yuliia Starodubtseva or Jéssica Bouzas Maneiro—her only real distinction being a handful of extra Top 100 wins.

This season, by contrast, presents one of the strongest rookie classes in years. Seven players—Mboko, Boisson, Joint, Jovic, Lys, Arango, and Eala—have all broken into the Top 50 despite ending 2024 outside the Top 100, and Tjen has remarkably closed the season at No. 53 after barely debuting on the Tour at the U.S. Open.

A few names still merit mention. Eva Lys and Solana Sierra both made history as lucky losers reaching the second week of a Slam, a rare feat. Lys, in particular, could have been a convincing nominee in most other years, thanks to consistent results across the calendar and as one of just eleven players to win a main draw match at every Grand Slam in 2025.

Best Comeback

Ballot:

• Belinda BENCIC

• Loïs BOISSON

• Sorana CÎRSTEA

• Markéta VONDROUŠOVÁ

• Caty MCNALLY

Next In:

• Barbora KREJČÍKOVÁ

• Kaja JUVAN

I find it difficult to justify a sixth nominee if the WTA chooses to revert to a six-player pool after trimming it to five last year. Including Naomi Osaka, who was already nominated last year, would feel like a stretch—her return began at the very start of last season, and she competed with a consistent schedule rather than sporadically. Karolína Muchová, who re-emerged during last season’s grass swing, makes a slightly stronger case, yet still stretches the spirit of a true comeback.

The other Kaja’s resurgence has been the most genuinely encouraging, after having dealt with family grief and mental struggles to capture two WTA 125 titles in Ljubljana and Samsun, the biggest titles of her career, but her broader impact on the Tour remains too limited to carry substantial weight. The same logic could apply to Anastasija Sevastova or Zhu Lin, both admirable for commendable performances in one or two events, yet marginal in overall influence.

It feels almost absurd that Boisson’s season might end without an award recognizing her remarkable year, whether for Best comeback or Newcomer. Perhaps the WTA could strike a compromise with multiple nominations, something it has only done once before, for Markéta Vondroušová’s 2023 season, which earned her nods for both Player of the Year and Best Comeback.

Best Coach

Ballot:

• Rick VLEESHOUWERS

• Conchita MARTÍNEZ

• Anton DUBROV

• Bjorn FRATANGELO

• Igor ANDREEV

Next In:

• Kasper ELSVAD

• Iain HUGHES

• Nathalie TAUZIAT

Is there any real point in compiling a shortlist after the WTA scrapped it entirely last year? It marks a new low—though hardly an unpredictable one by their standards. Historically, this category has functioned less as a genuine accolade than as a catch-all, a convenient receptacle for names that don’t fit neatly elsewhere. In that sense, it has always flirted with self-indulgence, if not outright redundancy, echoing elements of Player of the Year, Most Improved, and Newcomer without ever articulating its own raison d’être.

Consider last year’s winner, Renzo Furlan. Could one mount a counterargument that he was not, strictly speaking, the “best” coach? Probably not. From a results-oriented perspective, the choice is defensible. Yet the omission of other nominees, particularly in a year when female coaches like Patricia Tarabini, Conchita Martínez, and Sandra Zaniewska left discernible marks, felt strikingly tone-deaf.

The nomination structure is also uncomfortably top-heavy, habitually sidelining the formative coaches shaping players on the cusp of a breakthrough, simply because their labor has yet to yield Tour-level accolades. When recognition is tethered so rigidly to tangible outcomes, the subtler alchemy, the patient scaffolding of careers, the cultivation of intangibles, vanishes from view. Elena Bolvina in 2023 and Sašo Pistotnik in 2025 exemplify this persistent blind spot.

The approach here is therefore entirely eclectic: less about personal preference than about predicting who the WTA is likely to honor. And yet, given precedent, it would be hardly shocking if the final announcement bypasses all nuance, landing instead on a choice as specious as it is predictable.

Doubles Team of the Year

Ballot:

• Sara ERRANI / Jasmine PAOLINI

• Taylor TOWNSEND / Kateřina SINIAKOVÁ

• Veronika KUDERMETOVA / Elise MERTENS

• Gabriela DABROWSKI / Erin ROUTLIFFE

• Mirra ANDREEVA / Diana SHNAIDER

• Tímea BABOS / Luisa STEFANI

I secretly suspect I watch more doubles than at least half the X accounts spamming “#watchmoreDOUBLES,” but still not enough to be contrarian and stray from this decidedly unadventurous list.

The small, combustible theatre of social media obeys its own merciless laws of contagion: a one-minute video, a raised eyebrow, and something meant to vanish becomes collective property. This paradox played out vividly in the recent episode involving Taylor Townsend, the American tennis player who posted a short, now-deleted Instagram story reacting with visible disgust to dishes: bullfrog and sea cucumber at a buffet in Shenzhen during the Billie Jean King Cup. The videos spread swiftly, drawing sharp criticism and prompting Townsend to issue an apology on Instagram.

The incident has no doubt exposed the subject’s glaring lack of cultural awareness: a trivial gesture in one context became headline news in another that violated local expectations. There is a mechanical cruelty here: private gestures made public, swift communal judgment, contrition performed under pressure. Through the lens of Nadia Asparouhova’s Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, the episode gains unexpected significance. Antimemes, she explains, are ideas that resist sharing. Yet Townsend’s awkward, deleted remarks defied this, exploding into global attention. The knee-jerk answer is the Streisand effect: attempts to suppress attention amplify it. But Asparouhova urges us to go further, examining the anatomy of attention itself: the tastes, taboos, and incentives that make ideas stick.

Two dynamics converge. First, content that violates norms—and comes from a public figure—becomes valuable raw material: outrage, schadenfreude, identity work. Townsend’s offhand disgust, amplified by cultural misreading, became high-yield. Second, social platforms optimize for rapid, affective exchange, not nuance. What resists sharing in Asparouhova’s account, an antimeme, is often what the platformed crowd finds most shareable, because it touches a nerve.

There is an almost elegiac quality to conversations that no longer find durable spaces, slow, contingent exchanges requiring trust and context rather than fifteen-second spotlights. Townsend’s improvised pettiness exposes this gap. Had her reaction occurred privately or been handled with careful reportage, it might have inspired curiosity or a discreet apology. On platforms engineered for instant judgment, repair is constrained to obligatory ritual of remorse performed in view of all.

I struggle to find a tidy moral. Public figures might practice cultural humility; platforms could privilege context over immediacy. More modestly, we might cultivate restraint: consume less reflexively, pause before judging. Asparouhova offers a subtler remedy: create spaces where the unshareable works without a forced spotlight. Whisper networks, private channels where complex truths circulate, are not a failure but a complement.

Townsend’s story will likely fade from public memory, but Asparouhova’s question lingers: what value do we lose to viral attention? Perhaps the most memetic idea worth spreading is this: slow down, listen in corners, and accept that not every passing reaction, especially shaped by cultural blind spots, needs global scrutiny.

A personal antimemetic manifests in my tennis spectatorship.

Everyone knows the figure of the gloryhunter, the bandwagoner, that perennial type in the grand auditorium of sport: success is magnetic, a player dazzles, and followers arrive in droves. The pattern feels natural, almost gravitational, as though victory carries its own field of attraction.

I invert the script. When a player rises, some tether in me slackens. Whenever asked to clarify this sentiment, weird as it sounds, I keep returning to the metaphor of a janitor at the gates of the WTA Tour. I linger there, ushering in the new arrivals: the Czech teenager with a serve she can barely control, the veteran finally earning a main-draw berth after years in ITF outposts, the qualifier who packs convenience store snacks to save on per diems. I open the gate, step aside, and the moment they cross into recognition, my interest gradually dissolves. I retreat to the threshold, broom in hand, ready for the next hopeful. The cycle repeats endlessly, like a hall of mirrors reflecting what is never quite the same twice.

For years, I treated this quirk as a idiosyncratic axiom, unexamined as breathing. Asparouhova’s book gave language to it: in informational terms, my fandom is antimemetic. Where attachment spreads like wildfire—success breeding attention, attention breeding more glory—I am drawn to the unclaimed, the almost-there, the liminal.

There is a strange symmetry between these two forms of antimemetic experience. Townsend’s brief, private disgust exploded precisely because it defied the natural inertia of the unremarkable, the unsharable. My pleasure in tennis is the mirror image: a deliberate devotion to what refuses to spread, to what flourishes in the absence of mass attention. Perhaps it is my contrarian self seeking to reconcile public spectacle and private value, the memetic and the antimemetic, liberation from what could become viral and what is allowed to breathe quietly.

Tennis, more than almost any sport, sanctifies this posture. Picture a player on match point, the crowd barely stirring except for the soft rustle of leaves. Every muscle twitch, every hesitation in her gaze, is magnified under the lights; a single misstep becomes an open ledger of imperfection. No teammate shields her, no coach intervenes mid-swing. In that suspended moment, the audience inhabits her skin, feeling the tension of exposure and the weight of expectation.

To witness such solitude is to partake in the fragile intensity of effort—every tiny detail laid bare. But when triumph accumulates and the modest stands give way to vast stadiums, the intimacy fades; what was once local and suspenseful is swept into the light, its mystery dissolved under countless eyes.

And so I return to the gate, again and again, welcoming the next pilgrim with the bittersweet knowledge that if she blooms, she will vanish from my peculiar sight. Mine is a spectatorship shaped less by loyalty than by departure, less by devotion than by perpetual exodus. Perhaps this is why, when the commentator swells with “a new star is born,” no exhilaration arises within me. A star, to me, is most luminous before it is named—while it is still only becoming.

Veronika Erjavec deserves first mention—the season’s indisputable MVP by every possible measure. She qualified at the Australian Open and Wimbledon—where she went on to beat Kostyuk in the first round—and came within a match of the main draw in the other two. Few expected such consistency from her on the biggest stages, and that, perhaps, has been the joy in the even hum of her progress.

My fondest memory belongs to Anastasiia Sobolieva’s qualification at the Roland Garros. She would never win a qualifying match elsewhere in her career, but in that moment it felt indelible: the unexpected under-arm serves and equally unexpectedly shot-for-shot dominance, the sudden lift of something unlooked-for, and the sequel into the main draw: down 0–5, then up 6–5 against Shnaider in the opening round. Her second qualifying round match over Belgraver was perhaps the most competitive three-and-four win you could imagine, with so many shifts in momentum and layers of thought evident in each point (acceleration vs. deceleration, ad-side variations vs. returns that exploit the width and punish on-the-run shotmaking).

Of course there are countless other stories. Nina Stojanović navigating her comeback; Eva Lys and Solana Sierra carving their names into Slam record books as Lucky Losers in Melbourne and at SW19; Zhang Shuai quietly regathering her rhythm after a year best left behind; Claire Liu, after dipping into ITF qualies for the first time in five years just last month, finding renewed clarity and earning her place at her home Slam; Petra Marčinko and Victoria Jiménez Kasintseva, former junior Slam winners, finally starting to stir louder echoes in the higher echelons; Leyre Romero Gormaz evolving slowly but surely; The collegiate voices—Starodubtseva, Sawangkaew, Tjen, Vidmanová, and others—having a breakout or growing more insistent with every season. And beyond them, there are still more threads to follow: Wei, Monnet, Aiava, Micic, Tararudee, Shibahara… And how about the juniors: Jones, Langlais, Xu, Iyengar…

Every player carries her own chapter, and each can strike a ball in a way that matters, not in the gauzy, motivational-poster sense of “every shot counts,” but in the literal, physical, almost moral sense that the way a ball leaves a racquet is a form of inscription, a line added to the ongoing book of the match, the tournament, sometimes that defines the whole year. In this sense, qualifying is not a prelude, not a curtain-raising cameo to be hurried through (remember how weird US Open 2020 felt?). It is part of the architecture of the Slam, a set of foundations without which the edifice tilts. The little “Q” or “LL” beside a name, once absorbed into the main draw, fades back into a typeface, no longer a footnote. The supposed hierarchy it pretends to announce has dissolved.

Tereza Valentová put this sentiment best in one of her interviews.

Ale jako je mi to jedno, prostě – hraje se tak i tak a není to tak, že ta vysoko nasazení by měla vyhrát. To je jenom papírové. Ale jinak… tenis je prostě tenis, no, a může vyhrát kdokoliv. Prostě jak se to celkově sejde.

But I really don’t care, it’s just that the match is played the same way, and it’s not like the higher seed is supposed to win. That’s just on paper. Otherwise... tennis is just tennis, and anyone can take the win. It all comes down to how it actually plays out.

None of this is to inflate the underdog myth with syrupy sentiment, or to pretend that every qualifier is bound for a fairytale (we had enough of that four years ago). The truth is way less narratively convenient. These players arrive not just with tactical nuance and technical precision—sometimes instinctive but premature, sometimes polished and quietly ready—but also with the wear of travel: budget flights at odd hours, nights in anonymous hotels on the city’s edge, practices shoehorned between matches on courts no camera will ever record, the fluorescent bulbs buzzing faintly overhead. A Tour anchor directly accepted into the main draw often has her team, her physio, her hotel driver; a qualifier may have a parent stringing rackets in the players’ lounge or a lone coach juggling multiple charges.

What fascinates most is to observe how they problem-solve in that crucible. A backhand that falters in the wind must be retooled mid-rally; the body, stiff from three days of matches, has to respond with one more burst of speed. Some draw on instinct, others a deliberate plan, yet all are compelled to weigh their strengths against their frailties in real time, with no time-outs, under the inexorable pressure of knowing that no outcome is assured.

So, good luck, qualifiers. The hymn of mankind is the hymn of courage. And on these outer courts, before the lights and the cameras, courage is not an anthem. It is a daily act, struck ball by ball, until the world finally notices.

And of course I will end with something related to a number—because what else would you expect from me at this point :)

Oksana Selekhmeteva has qualified and drawn Markéta Vondroušová once more, a repeat of their first-round clash in Paris. Both are left-handers with forehands that whip and backhand slices that have a great disguise, though the way they fold those slices into their games diverges so sharply that the comparison feels stretched for now. Still, what is the chance that they, both as unseeded players, reunite in New York (given they have met in the previous Slam main draw they both contested)? This is the same statistical quirk that once saw Isner–Mahut in the first round at Wimbledon two years running—a rare alignment, with the odds landing at just 0.7%.

Writing about Šramková has been the hardest of all. I cut and stitched, polished and pared, and every pass only seemed to uncover more to keep—so in the end I could cut nothing. What remains is not a tidy essay but a long breath: my attempt to hold what I know of her, and to give shape to the gratitude and fierce affection I feel.

It’s a different kind of attachment than the ones reserved for the familiar constellations of contemporary Slovakian women’s tennis: Hantuchová will always be Daniela; Cibulková is a Grand Slam finalist and WTA Finals champion; Rybáriková had a Tour title before she was twenty-one; Suchá was an irreplaceable piece of the 2002 Fed Cup-winning squad; Mihalíková has been a force in doubles; Kučová, Čepelová, and Hrunčáková each had their moments; Jamrichová and Pohánková are prodigious junior Slam winners. Those names more or less arrived with headlines and promise; hers arrived as slow, stubborn weather, kind of damp at the edges.

Where others were polished early, Šramková’s path was a rough-hewn track cut against the grain. She was also once a talented junior, yes—but a prospect forged not in comfort. Even at her early, unlikely moments like that 2017 Fed Cup World Group II tie against Italy, stunning two former Top 10 players Sara Errani and Francesca Schiavone when she was ranked outside the Top 100 herself. It would take another seven years just to regain that same ranking. She reminds us that unfinished stories can still turn beautiful.

Šramková’s beginnings were unromantic and true. Čunovo: a family house, a childhood smelling of river mud and walnuts. She ran barefoot through grass wet with dawn, played football with boys, learned to mend a knee with her own hands, and learned to catch fish with patience. Once, she brought home a grass snake in a jar.

Even just reaching the starting line was a battle. She was born with severely limited vision in one eye. “The doctor advised me to start playing tennis, that it could help me train my eyes,” she once recalled. “I can’t say what it’s like to see as a healthy person. I used to play with contact lenses, but it wasn’t the same.” Without this so-called handicap, she might never have picked up a racket at all. That was perhaps the least painful part of her story.

Her father, Jozef, an artist, designer, and former table tennis player, saw something in her, a compass needle tilting toward tennis, and enrolled her in a club. Preparation was basic, recovery accidental, and mental training unheard of. There was no grand plan, only repetition and the stubborn faith of a man unwilling to let repetition be the end.

They trained on concrete courts hemmed in by Petržalka’s apartment blocks. When the federation offered little, and when officials told Jozef his presence would “disturb the peace” and barred him from the National Centre, he made his own answer. He built courts on every surface he could find, even a patch of grass in a climate that punished such things. He sold inherited land, took out a €130,000 loan to keep her afloat—a debt he still carries well into Šramková’s early professional career.

As she grew, her body and strokes hinted at something luminous. But the rest reads like a catalogue of suffering. She was just twenty, close to the world’s Top 100, when her body began to betray her—first a back injury that stole nearly a year, then her abdomen, shoulder, elbow, each demanding its own toll. And when it seemed the worst was over, a double fatigue fracture in her leg, followed by surgery. She admits there were days she wanted to “quit everything.” What kept her here was not comfort, but something deeper, something that endured even when she ate rice for three months after leaving home because she couldn’t afford both food and a coach.

Her bond with Jozef, the man who first glimpsed her spark and lit the way, fractured long before her body did. The coach-player relationship, once fierce with belief, became unbearable under the weight of pressure. At eighteen, she raised her head and walked out the door without a single euro in her pocket. “That’s when I told myself I loved tennis enough to endure even starvation,” she said. She never looked back.

Like a ship departing its home port, she left behind a tangled harbor of love and expectations stretched almost to breaking. Time has softened the sharpest edges in the relationship with her father, yet the distance between them remains measured in words and rare meetings. Some journeys never fully close. The shadow of that departure still lingers as a quiet testament to the cost of chasing a dream alone.

The Federation, too, has its tides, swelling with new resources and ambition, casting wider nets to catch the next wave of talent. But for Šramková, this tide came just after her moment—too late to carry her fully onward. She stood between eras: narrowly missing the golden generation of Hantuchová, Cibulková, and Rybáriková, who together reached the Fed Cup semifinals in 2013, as well as the surge that followed: two junior Wimbledon singles champions amid a new wave of rising stars. Alongside Schmiedlová and Hrunčáková, she was part of that bridge, straddling what came before and what was yet to come. Perhaps that is why their run to the Billie Jean King Cup final last year after a twenty-two-year wait felt so achingly precious, and perhaps richer than just a Cinderella story.

Sometimes, I still see her as the slightly frail player at the Bella Cup of Poland six years ago—a bit reckless, unpredictable, too light in frame for the gravity of her ambition, the high toss and higher-kicking second serves that kept troubling her opponents profusely, and the tightening grip of nerves at moments when the stakes soared. She has still got some of that, but also something you can’t really scout: the sheer ungentlemanly refusal to be done.

There have been heartbreaks I cannot forget. None more so than the 2023 Bari final against Tamara Zidanšek—the grandest stage she had known then—where four match points slipped through in the second set. Afterwards, she wrote:

It’s so hard to find the words after this final. Four uncovered match points, but that’s tennis. Uncompromising. It hurts so much, but we need to work hard again and keep going.

I am so thankful to my team and everyone who believes in me in my career, and I hope that I will have another chance to win.

I remember that ceremony—her smile for the cameras, the barely contained tears, the knowledge that the moment would be preserved forever when she might have wished it erased.

And then there are moments of private shame. I urged a local friend to watch her in the 2024 Jiangxi Open. He returned unimpressed—presumably after seeing only the match she lost, the final: She’s a good player, but nothing special… a good September run, but she’ll probably fall back to where she belongs. I felt a flare of defensiveness, an urge to shield her with words, to scream that a career cannot be measured by a single tournament result, that the invisible years of grinding practice, the nights spent fighting fatigue and doubt, the silent toll of fifteen matches in nineteen days across three countries—none of it counts for nothing. Yet every sentence I tried seemed too small, too brittle to hold the weight of her persistence, her unshakable drive, the pulse of her work that thrums beneath the surface, unseen and uncelebrated.

But there is no mistaking it that she is becoming an anchor for the Tour, and after all the harsh chapters, for the national team as well. Have you ever ridden a Ferris wheel? Right now, I feel perched at its highest point, witnessing her and this side at their peak. I do not know if the future will be better, or if we will meet again, or if—as the Ferris wheel turns—we will simply descend, back to where we began, only this time without the old companion.

I wish you all the best for the future, Rebecca. You deserve greater recognition and louder applause. As for your level, just two years ago, when you came back from down 1-5 in the third to beat Karolína Muchová at the Warsaw Open as a qualifier, the common reaction from the online tennis community was: Another Muchová choke. How could she lose to a journeywoman like her? A year later, after back-to-back finals in Monastir and Hua Hin II, after almost singlehandedly carrying Slovakia to the Billie Jean King Cup final, the tone changed: I love the way she competes. She’s going to make more dents on the Tour. The shift in chorus, however mercurial, is the proof of your progress, of more voices believing in you.

Spread your wings, Becca. Fly higher still. And if you come back down, we will still be here, same sky, still watching.

2003

Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Świątek have become the first women’s duo to reach the semifinals at the first three Grand Slams of a season since Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters in 2006. And they are standing on the verge of something even rarer: becoming the first pair to make the semifinals at all four majors in a single year since the same two Belgians in 2003.

Sabalenka is also hoping to reach all four major semifinals for a second season—something only seven women in the Open Era have done multiple times: Margaret Court, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Martina Hingis, Justine Henin, and Serena Williams.

6

Besides the previously mentioned Sabalenka and Świątek, Mirra Andreeva stands out as the only player to have reached the second week at every Slam so far this year. At the US Open, Amanda Anisimova, Liudmila Samsonova, and Ekaterina Alexandrova (all Russians or with Russian connections) are bidding to join the growing honor roll of players to reach the last 16 on all surfaces, which has expanded by one player each year since 2022.

63%

Venus Williams is looking to return to the US Open, which, depending on your temperament on wildcard selections, can feel like either a heartwarming nod to legacy or an ongoing exercise in the uneasy ethics of ceremonial obligation, performed under the weight of what one might call tennis’s institutionalized reverence, or, more cynically, its political fatalism. (Personally, I’m rather indifferent.)

That said, if one is to celebrate her remarkable longevity, consider this: when Venus made her US Open debut in 1997, 67 of 107 players confirmed so far for this US Open main draw had not even been born yet.

16

Each of the last sixteen editions of US Open has featured at least one player with Stanford ties—thanks in large part to Nicole Gibbs, Kristie Ahn, and, more recently, Valerie Glozman.

I am writing the sentence above through excruciating pain as a Cal alumnus.

1983

The last time all four Grand Slam finals in a single calendar year featured an American woman was 2002, when the Williams sisters met in three of them as part of the iconic Serena Slam. But to find a year where four different American women reached those finals, you would need to go back further to 1983, when Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Andrea Jaeger, and Kathy Jordan carried the torch. It is a rare feat that only occurred twice in the Open Era (the other in 1979), and just two other times overall (1950 and 1957). Could the likes of Jessica Pegula, Emma Navarro, Sofia Kenin, or… Valerie Glozman makes it happen again?

43

This US Open is plausibly Caroline Garcia’s Slam swan song. The former world No. 4 and winner of 11 WTA titles held the longest active streak at 49 consecutive main draws until skipping Wimbledon this year. The baton now passes to Kateřina Siniaková and Yulia Putintseva, each riding a 43-event streak (counting this US Open).

Top 25

Karolína Muchová is clinging to her US Open semifinal points from last year like a lifeline: she could tumble out of the Top 25 without deep runs at the North American hard-court swing. The same urgency applies to Linda Nosková with her Monterrey title points on the line. Without tempting fate, we could be approaching the first time that no Czech woman features in the WTA Top 25 since January 17, 2011.

It has been that kind of season for Czech women’s tennis. By the second week of June, Sára Bejlek’s WTA 125 title in Makarska would be the biggest singles trophy of the season for Czech women (they hadn’t approached Wimbledon this empty-handed since 2012, when Lucie Šafářová’s ITF W100 was the lone bright spot). Thankfully, Markéta Vondroušová said Not on my watch and took care of business in Berlin.

0-7

Anna Blinkova and Viktorija Golubic will each head to the US Open with a 0–7 main draw record at Flushing Meadows—the most appearances without a win among this year’s field. Interestingly, at the three previous Grand Slams this season, the players with the longest winless streak among direct entrants—Yuan Yue (0-2) at the Australian Open, Greet Minnen (0-4) at the Roland Garros, and both Elena-Gabriela Ruse and Jil Teichmann (0-4) at the Wimbledon—all extended their winless runs. Will the two break the pattern?

16

Aryna Sabalenka has won 14 consecutive tiebreaks at Grand Slams, one win away from Novak Đoković’s record on the men’s side. She also holds a 16–1 overall record in tiebreaks this season (including those 15 in a row), one win away from the standalone Open Era record for most wins in a calendar year on the WTA Tour. For the first time in years, Andy Roddick’s mark of 18 straight wins looks genuinely under threat.

38

I like what I have seen from Jéssica Bouzas Maneiro this season so far. She has shown enough progress to merit serious consideration for a nomination of the year-end WTA Most Improved Player award, even if she hasn’t yet secured a marquee tournament result. What also stands out is how she bounced back from a disappointing 3-8 start of the year in main draw and posted a respectable 16-6 since April. Kamilla Rakhimova’s turnaround is equally striking: 12-6 since the grass season started, compared to a rough 9-17 across all competitions before that.

It’s not exactly difficult to find these kinds of performance partitions, and they are certainly not exclusive to the WTA Tour or even Top 200 players (you might be interested to learn that the world No. 663 Noemi Basiletti has gone 10-2 since June after a 9-11 stretch earlier). The real challenge, however, is assessing the quality of these purple patches—are they mutations or noises? A player’s ranking often fails to capture their present form, which is why we frequently hear phrases like “Player A is overranked” or “Player B is underranked.” Such labels point to the cyclical inertia embedded in the WTA’s ranking system, and shifts in perception and reality often begin even before a player’s breakout surge or impending slump has fully played out.

After some benchmarking studies on the Tour, 38 days (with standard deviations) emerges as a useful rule of thumb to estimate how far the official WTA rankings typically lag behind a player’s Elo rating if we use the latter as a fair-value estimator of a player’s relative strength to the field. Of course, this method relies on several assumptions, some of which are idiosyncratic, and has an uncanny knack for syncing with whichever stretch of the calendar you happen to be scrutinizing. Still, it offers a somewhat helpful perspective. Here’s what happens when the stars align perfectly: when Anna Kalinskaya defeated Jelena Ostapenko to reach quarters in Dubai last year, her live WTA ranking rose to No. 31, the same as her Elo ranking from, you guessed it, 38 days ago (her official ranking then was No. 75).

80/70/65

Elena Rybakina is holding serve at 81.7% this season, the highest among players with more than sporadic presence on the Tour. Her break points saved rate stands at 65.9%—again, the Tour’s best by a wide margin and the highest of her career. She is also winning 73.8% of first serve points, second only to Naomi Osaka this year. That puts her in a rare company: among players with at least 20 WTA main draw matches in a single season in the last ten years, only Rybakina this season and Lulu Sun in 2024 (sitting right on that 20-match threshold) have reached the 80%-70%-65% benchmark across service hold%, first serve points won%, and break points saved%, respectively.

The top-line statistics could help form an argument for the continuation of Rybakina’s serving prowess, supported by more advanced serve statistics that suggest this season is at least as refined as her celebrated 2023 campaign, widely regarded as her most complete to date. But dig a little deeper, there have been signs of creeping sameness in less depth on serve under pressure points, less immediacy in her follow-ups, and a slightly dulled edge when absorbing pressure from assertive returners. Her clinical edge on break points doesn’t fully insulate her either. She concedes on average one break point per 1.86 service games, just a tiny bit better than 1.79 from last year.

Rybakina’s serve remains a blend of technical precision and intuitive execution. This is best illustrated by the fact that she doesn’t rely on rigid serve patterns to find her footing in a match. Instead, she makes micro-adjustments after reading the returner’s rhythm over the course of play. From a purely correlational perspective, the rise in service hold and service points won percentages this year has sourced more from an improved second serve. Meanwhile, her first-serve efficiency frontier, a way to measure first-serve output across varying risk appetites, sits at 0.853, down from last year’s 0.884 (produced in a season when she served more conservatively by her standards). Together, these factors hint at a theoretical upside if she aims for the greater aggression in targeting seen in 2023.

As with managing an investment portfolio, so it is with first-strike tennis: even for an “effortless” server like Lena, balancing and rebalancing risk profile is a lifelong undertaking.

I find the backlash directed at Loïs Boisson for her first-round qualifying loss yesterday to Carson Branstine both disproportionate and intellectually lazy.

Let me be clear: I don’t see her as a lock for a Wimbledon main draw wildcard, nor would I necessarily place her above the eight players I’ve already predicted—each of whom has a compelling case. But the idea that a single qualifying round loss should summarily exile her from the conversation betrays a shallow reading, and is, to start with, dismissive backpedaling.

This is not fundamentally a Boisson problem. It’s a structural one. The current calendar compresses Roland Garros and Wimbledon into a three-week gap, while main draw cut-offs remain frozen six weeks before Wimbledon begins. That means if you weren’t already inside the ranking threshold before Paris, no level of clay-court heroics, no matter how resonant or inspiring, will register in time. There is neither an empirical nor a principled reason why the All England Club should be expected to underwrite the broader systematic laggedness of the Tour, but nor should it be treated as heresy to suggest she was a plausible candidate. And if she were chosen, it wouldn’t strike me as any less compelling than, say, Ajla Tomljanovic last year or Arthur Fils in 2023, two players whose inclusions, at the time, were far more a product of convenient narratives than unassailable merit.

That said, the larger issue here isn’t wildcard politics, but the reactionary impulse to invalidate a player’s trajectory after a single loss in qualifying. There seems to be an unspoken collective yearning to see Boisson’s Parisian breakthrough instantly blossom into the next phase of her career, but that hope is often wrapped in misplaced expectations.

Context matters. Boisson found herself in a particularly unforgiving section, opening against Carson Branstine and potentially facing Bianca Andreescu, coincidentally a two-time junior Slam doubles pairing. Given her complete lack of matchplay on grass, her surface-specific Elo gave her less than a 30% chance of even reaching the final qualifying round. Both the broader field-adjusted Elo and extrapolated bookmaker odds broadly agree with the placement.

Yet much of the post-match commentary reads as if she failed in a vacuum.

The irony, of course, is that those most vocally invoking the “merit” of wildcard distribution often do so under the banner of objectivity, while betraying little familiarity with the match itself. If merit is to be gauged by on-court performance, then criticism divorced from actual play is beyond disingenuous.

Even more insidious is the way this conversation has started to bleed into assessments of the Frenchwoman herself, as though she were somehow complicit in the perceived absurdity. This is where the boundary between “wildcard discourse” and character assassination dissolves entirely (Did she lobby for it by issuing a manifesto? Refuse to play unless gifted entry?) The suggestion that she has become the center of a “wildcard non-sense” scandal (yes, people are spelling it like that) is a pure projection from an echo chamber carrying a performative outrage to mistake its own feedback loop for legitimacy.

But let me offer something quieter, and I hope truer. Without sounding contrarian, what stayed with me this season wasn’t her Saint-Gaudens title, her first in over a year, or the Roland-Garros semifinal, the lovely and narrative-friendly data points, but rather a relatively unremarked match in February’s Manchester W35, indoors, against #467-ranked Daria Frayman. This was Boisson’s first match back post-surgery, marginally ahead of the recovery schedule her team had initially projected after the operation. She won in three sets, two of them tiebreaks, the kind of scrappy match that often gets dismissed in box score summaries. But there was improved movement, a basic attacking framework on short balls, and defensive awareness and willingness to retrieve like a touchline receiver, the sort that almost no one has in their first match back unless they have been preparing not just physically, but also, cognitively.

And I remember writing, after that match, probably more to myself than anyone else: She has prepared herself for the new challenges well. I’m stating it now. I’ll stand by it even if she loses to Sofia Costoulas next round.

Which she did.

There is no reason not to now.

13–1

Aryna Sabalenka is now 13–1 in tiebreaks on Tour this season, well ahead of her nearest challengers, Elena Rybakina (9–4) and Clara Tauson (9–6). Notably, the count includes two tiebreak wins over Rybakina in the Berlin quarterfinals last week. Sabalenka’s standout performance recalls Paula Badosa’s iconic 13-tiebreak win streak in 2021–2022. The only player to edge her this year is Ekaterina Alexandrova in the second round of Doha.

1

Elena Rybakina broke my heart. She held four match points against Sabalenka in that Berlin quarterfinal, and with just one conversion, would have become the first-ever female player in history, outside of team competitions, to defeat the World No. 1 on all of the grass, indoor hard, outdoor hard, indoor clay, and outdoor clay courts. Of course, the grandeur of that feat rests largely on a win in Stuttgart, the only indoor clay event where a meeting with the world No. 1 is even possible. But it is notoriously difficult: the top-ranked player had won 16 straight matches there since 2018 before Rybakina seized her opportunity there last year, and in her case, it was against someone who would hold a 63–3 record on clay as the World No.1 against everyone else. I still believe Lena will get another shot someday.

N Mod 2

Markéta Vondroušová is oddly good in odd-numbered years. Since 2017, she has checked off quite the list: first WTA title, Grand Slam finalist, Olympic finalist, Slam champion, Year-End Finals debut, and now another title in Berlin. Her year-by-year Tour main draw win rates from 2017 to 2025 support the pattern: 56.3%, 46.7%, 76.3%, 44.4%, 63.5%, 68.8%, 67.9%, 59.3%, and 68.8%. Injuries could explain a majority of the oscillation, but the way she rebounds with her level intact is a rare intangible.

126

I may have jinxed Daria Kasatkina. At the start of the season, she was just nine wins shy of Caroline Wozniacki’s record of 126 WTA 500 match wins since 2009. Since then, Dasha had four opening-round losses at her last seven events at this level and lost the last six of seven matches. The only other time she had a similar stretch at this level was from 2019 Stuttgart to 2020 Saint Petersburg when she went 1–7. All this, a season after leading the Tour in WTA 500 wins (26).

The silver lining? She has at least rediscovered some of her best form this year at the Slams, reaching the second week in both Melbourne and Paris—something only seven other players have achieved this season. Of that group, Dasha is the only one not ranked inside the Top 9 in the Race to Riyadh.

M > 0

Elise Mertens might be the most statistically honest WTA player in terms of her career win rates by opponent’s rankings:

• vs. Top 10: 12–43 (21.8%)

• vs. Top 20: 27–76 (26.2%)

• vs. Top 30: 49–97 (33.6%)

• vs. Top 40: 69–116 (37.3%)

• vs. Top 50: 96–127 (43.0%)

• vs. Top 60: 124–140 (47.0%)

• vs. Top 70: 147–149 (49.7%)

• vs. Top 80: 172–158 (52.2%)

• vs. Top 90: 196–164 (54.4%)

• vs. Top 100: 221–169 (56.7%)

• vs. Top 150: 275–196 (58.4%)

• vs. Top 200: 302–213 (58.6%)

• vs. Top 300: 347–232 (59.9%)

• vs. Top 500: 395–261 (60.2%)

I like things when they stay monotonically increasing.

65%+

Petra Kvitová’s upcoming retirement will mark the departure of one of only seven active players with an above-65% win rate at all four Grand Slams. No active player has managed to exceed 70% at every major, but three are within reach: Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek, and Coco Gauff all have a realistic chance of hitting that mark. Unsurprisingly, Wimbledon is the missing piece of the puzzle for each of them. Surprisingly, all three share the exact same record at the All-England Club: 11–5.

17 years, 191 days

Iva Jovic defeated Rebecca Marino in the Ilkley final to become the youngest-ever WTA 125 singles champion, surpassing CiCi Bellis. I wrote a bit about it on X and the shared threads between Iva and CiCi are uncanny: extreme forehand grips, wrist-fed serves, an unshakable clarity of purpose, and that they are both coached by Tom Gutteridge. Last week felt like the loop was closed. Still, I carry a concern for Iva’s wrist, knowing too well what came next for CiCi.

2008

The Class of 2007 has long been hailed as a particularly strong cohort, recently underscored when Iva Jovic and Tereza Valentová both claimed WTA 125 singles titles in the same week. Despite still technically being juniors, six players from that group are set to appear in this year’s Wimbledon main draw and qualifying. This count has excluded a sidelined Brenda Fruhvirtová, who did manage a notable win over Mirra Andreeva in the last year’s edition.

Meanwhile, the Class of 2008 is shaping up to be quite promising as well. After Lilli Tagger’s triumph at junior Roland Garros a few weeks ago, the group has collectively won the last three junior Grand Slams and reached the finals in six straight events. While we can’t directly equate junior Slam’s presence to pro breakthroughs and the strength as a whole, given some rising stars would opt to skip junior events altogether, their streak of consistent finals appearances is already longer than what the standout Classes of 1997, 2001, or 2007 have managed.

3

After last week, even if you rudely take away half of McCartney Kessler’s WTA titles, she would still have more than Karolína Muchová, Anna Kalinskaya, Wang Xinyu, Ajla Tomljanovic, Rebeka Masarova, Aliaksandra Sasnovich, Shelby Rogers, and Madison Brengle combined.

On a more serious note, I have long had a soft spot for McCartney, someone I happen to know indirectly through a friend and have felt emotionally connected to since her Florida Gators days. There is a whole Substack post waiting to be written about that. But for now, I will just say: time really does fly. I can still vividly recall her qualifying for Wimbledon main draw last year despite being a total grass rookie, drawing Maria Sakkari in the first round, and losing in straight sets. That match never quite felt too competitive despite the American hustled to break a couple of times. One year later, if they were to meet again—anywhere but clay—a Sakkari win might honestly feel like an upset now.

69

Alizé Cornet is back in Grand Slam qualifying for the first time since the 2007 US Open, and only the fourth time overall in her career. It is easy to forget she ever had to qualify at all, given her extraordinary run of 69 consecutive Grand Slam main draw appearances, a streak that began at the 2007 Australian Open and became an all-time record in itself. Even when she fell in the final round of Wimbledon qualifying that same year, she still found her way into the main draw as a lucky loser. In hindsight, that streak feels more untouchable than ever.

1980s

On the topic of streaks, players born in the 1980s have enjoyed an impressively lasting presence at Grand Slam main draws since the 1995 Australian Open, when Martina Hingis made her debut, and they haven’t missed one since.

The question now is: how long can this remarkable run continue? There is a reason for cautious optimism after Tatjana Maria became the fourth-oldest WTA singles titlist at the Queen’s Club and would remain safely within the main draw cutoff for some time, though she would stand as the only Top 100 player from her birth decade just a week later, after Victoria Azarenka’s incredible 901-week stay in the Top 100 came to a pause. But Vika isn’t down for long, as she is in action this week at Bad Homburg, with a chance to immediately secure a re-entrance to the Top 100 if she can overcome another 1980s veteran, Laura Siegemund, in the opening round. Their rivalry is part of a small, meaningful circle of players keeping the decade alive on tour. Just recently, Vika faced Yanina Wickmayer at Roland Garros, the only meeting between 1980s-born players at that event. Could this be the last time we see such a battle at the Slams? Time will tell.

Before the seismic turn in Aryna Sabalenka’s career—roughly spanning late 2022 into early 2023, it would have been no travesty, and perhaps even generous, to suggest she wasn’t the most clinical or the most clutch presence when it came to the Grand Slam.

Even now, with the lens of hindsight sharpened by the calibration of three Slam titles and one final win away from the fourth, it is arguable that the taut wires of pressure still strum uneasily under her more manufactured composure. Sabalenka’s career record in Grand Slam three-set matches hovers uncomfortably at 52%. And before this year’s Australian Open quarterfinals against Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, she had not prevailed in a match at this level after winning the first set and then stumbling into a decider since the first round of the US Open 2021 against Nina Stojanović in a contest whose second-set tiebreak may still merit the services of a psychotherapist.

Prior to the Pavlyuchenkova win and this long interregnum of three-set resilience, Sabalenka’s record when leading by a set but dragged into a third stood at a troubling 3–9. That’s not just subpar; it edges toward a case study in unraveling nerves, strings fraying like overstretched polyester. For some comparisons, Daria Kasatkina boasted an 8–1 record in such scenarios, and Elina Svitolina 13–3. If one were tempted to chalk this up to playing style, that aggressors tend to wilt amid rally chaos, then Naomi Osaka (12–4) and Madison Keys (17–8) might politely suggest otherwise.

And still, the nerves were visible in yesterday’s semifinal against Iga Świątek. Sabalenka trailed by a break when she uncorked what was unmistakably a line-brushing ace at 0–15. The judge called it out. Kader Nouni then overturned the call and confirmed the ace. But when the point was replayed, the bite had vanished. Sabalenka misfired, fell to 0–30, and two tentative second serves later, she was broken. One could almost see the bad call fermenting in her mind like a sour memory.

Jeff Sackmann went into detail on Sabalenka’s under-pressure tendencies after her Australian Open semifinal win over Coco Gauff last year, and it’s characteristically brilliant. But what I wanted to get at here is less quantifiable and more disquietingly obvious to the naked eye: when Sabalenka isn’t mired in self-doubt, she becomes not just assured, but startlingly inventive. Her variety unfurls. The ball begins to float and torque at improbable angles, as though her forearm has discovered a new vocabulary. You don’t measure it so much as feel the tennis brain’s synapses firing with newfound flexibility.

Of course, nothing is truly unquantifiable, and this observation is both crude and matchup-specific. Still, consider the Świątek semifinal: Sabalenka’s percentage of non-groundstroke points stood at 12.5%, lower in raw terms than the 18.84% she logged during her 6–1, 6–0 demolition of Kamilla Rakhimova in the first round. Yet, that percentage stood several standard deviations above the tournament median, a modest but meaningful triumph in a matchup where consistency was under constant threat. Świątek, for all the chatter about her own second serve vulnerabilities, is capable of ripping the next return and shattering rhythm herself (tellingly, both players won more points than their opponent in the 5–8 shot rally on return).

None of this is meant to sow doom or affix an asterisk to Sabalenka’s résumé ahead of her bid for the fourth Grand Slam title, but one cannot gloss over the slight diminishment or diffusion of the intensity of what was once a more threatening first serve, which could be a whole new topic for another day, but it bears mention that even if that weapon has dimmed by a watt or two, it remains far from expended.

And crucially, she still believes in that serve, deep in the calcified core of her competitive marrow, and that conviction feels less mechanical now. This is the same player who, in this week’s quarterfinal against Zheng Qinwen, fired off two untouchable aces in a tiebreak that teetered on collapse. I almost felt the same sensation rippled through the junior girls’ quarterfinal between Emerson Jones and Julieta Pareja, when the Australian top seed was staring down a 0–5* deficit in the first set, and still unflinchingly leaned into her signature backhand inverse redirects, a stroke that had betrayed her earlier, but one the opponent still refused to bet against even when it seemed to have lost its sting.

As ever, metrics can only half-illuminate what the eye sees as a whole. Despite the argument on Sabalenka’s long-term first-serve dips, she (28) has nonetheless joined a rare cadre of women to log 25 or more aces in a single edition of Roland Garros this decade while putting up respectable numbers on first-serve effectiveness, second-serve points won%, and maintaining a balanced serve placement variety and Ace-DF ratio. With a final still to be played, Elena Rybakina’s mark of 31 from last year is also very much within her reach.

That second set Sabalenka ceded to Pavlyuchenkova in Melbourne snapped her 25-set winning streak then; yesterday, she ended Świątek’s 26-match reign at Roland Garros. Now 27, she has defined the women’s Grand Slam meta in the last three years, her records piling up, lighting up the headlines. But what lingers and will be relished longer is not that she has matched or extended another “since Serena” milestone or that if her nerve yips are now fully eradicated, but how she has been confronting them, whether by instinct or intention: under pressure, rewriting the “old Aryna” narrative, with just enough grit and clutch-time flair to suggest that this iteration may be more enduring than anyone once imagined.

Andreescu, Bianca (CAN) probably needs directions to the qualifying draw, because she looks like she belongs three rounds ahead. You are more likely to connect with her through the pages of her own picture book, Bibi’s Got Game: A Story about Tennis, Meditation and a Dog Named Coco, than whatever biographical breadcrumb trail Stephanie Myles leaves behind.

Andrianjafitrimo, Tessah (FRA) triumphed over Sarah Iliev in the first round of qualifying at this year’s WTA 125 Saint-Malo despite serving 22 double faults; that is a double fault rate of 20.4%.

Astakhova, Darya (RUS) was the only player who prepared by playing a W15 event the week prior to the qualifying.

Bandecchi, Susan (SUI) earned her first Billie Jean King Cup call-up in April’s qualifiers, reuniting with Jil Teichmann in a team event, a decade after they both reached the 2015 European Junior U18 Championships quarterfinals.

Bartashevich, Yara (FRA) is the only non-teenager in the field yet to register a Top 200 win (0-9).

Barthel, Mona (GER) has won a WTA 500 and WTA 250 singles title, a distinction shared by only one other player in the field, Sara Errani.

Bejlek, Sára (CZE) isn’t particularly bothered when referred to as “Bejleková” or “Bejlková,” but she prefers that the media use her actual surname without the feminine declension, Bejlek, as it appears on her birth certificate. Her mother also carries the name Bejlek.

Bektas, Emina (USA) had an awkward moment in her W100 Surbiton doubles final last year, staring across the net at her ex-tennis and life partner, Tara Moore.

Belgraver, Julie (FRA) comes from a tennis-rich family, and that’s probably an understatement. Her father, Martijn Belgraver, is a former ATP player and now GM of the Rafa Nadal Academy in Kuwait. Her mother, Noëlle van Lottum, reached No. 57 on the WTA Tour and now leads women’s tennis at Tennis Canada. Her uncle, John van Lottum, also played professionally, peaking at ATP No. 62 as well as winning five Challenger titles, and later briefly coached Elena Dementieva for two weeks in 2008.

Bogdan, Ana (ROU) has a perfect 5-0 record against Panna Udvardy, another qualifier in the draw, with wins on all three surfaces. It is the most dominant undefeated head-to-head advantage spanning all surfaces between any two players in the field.

Bolkvadze, Mariam (GEO) has not lost a match on clay since the first round of Roland Garros qualifying three years ago. The reverse also holds true.

Bošković, Lea (CRO) never quite clicked with school. Asked at 19 what her favorite subject was, she didn’t hesitate, “Nothing,” adding, “I mostly saw school and subjects as obligations I had to fulfill.”

Brancaccio, Nuria (ITA) is the player suffering from the most Grand Slam qualifying losses (5) without a single win in the field.

Branstine, Carson (CAN) has helped the Aggies win their first-ever NCAA Tournament title last year in her postseason. Before transferring to Texas A&M, she had spent a season at both USC and Virginia, although injuries mostly kept her from playing.

Bulgaru, Miriam (ROU) failed to convert seven match points—six on her own serve—against Polina Kudermetova in the second round of the WTA 125 Montreux last year. This was not quite the Viktoriya Tomova heartbreak in Madrid 2024, where Wang Xinyu saved ten to steal the win, the loss was still painful, especially as she fell before her second match point, unable to feel her knee. Redemption came a week later at another WTA 125, though, when the Romanian bounced back to snatch the biggest title of her career on home soil.

Buzărnescu, Mihaela (ROU) has not played a professional match since the first round of Iași 2022, where the former WTA No. 20 was leading 6–1, 5-3 against Cristina Dinu before an injury forced her to retire.

Cabrebra, Lizette (AUS) already has three grass titles this season, and it isn’t even June yet.

Carlé, María Lourdes (ARG) used to rock an air bang.

Chang, Hanna (USA) claimed one of her ITF singles titles after just eight minutes of play, when the opponent, Mary Stoiana, retired at 1–1 in the first set of the final due to fatigue.

Chirico, Luisa (USA) holds the head-to-head advantage over a slightly more recognized fellow American player of Korean descent.

Chwalińska, Maja (POL) is the enviable owner of two of these cuties1, having swept both singles and doubles in Florianópolis last year, the highest-tier women’s professional tennis tournament in Brazil then2.

Costoulas, Sofia (BEL), who represents Belgium, has family roots in Konitsa, a town in the Epirus region of Greece. Her name translates to “wise descendant of Constantine,” which seems autological considering she has a soft spot for a certain philosophical savant named Stefanos Tsitsipas.

Cross, Kayla (CAN) has helped LSU qualify for the NCAA Team Championship for the first time in program history in her first college season, while also contributing to the team’s all-time best record of 24–7, matching the mark set in 1978.

Dart, Harriet (GBR) reportedly has a strong disinclination to olfactory offense. As such, her nine-match losing streak on clay may be interpreted more as a nasal protest against the pungent charm of Madrid, Rome, Paris, Rabat, Charleston, and Rouen. She isn’t out of form, she is just out of Febreze.

Davis, Lauren (USA) trained at an academy, one that now brags, “Australian Open champs served here.”

Dmitruk, Kristina (BLR) is the only WTA-ranked Belarusian whose surname does not end in a vowel or an “h.”

Efremova, Ksenia (FRA), a much-touted Mouratoglou Tennis Academy product, became the youngest female ITF champion (at 14 year and 248 days) in 20 years following her W15 Monastir title in January 2024, a time when she was amassing more Instagram followers than Jasmine Paolini.

Erjavec, Veronika (SLO) qualified for her first ever Grand Slam main draw in the Australian Open earlier this year, a breakout performance as she led the qualifying competition in both Return Points Won% (56.42%) and Dominance Ratio (1.415).

Errani, Sara (ITA) ties the record among active Grand Slam finalists for the shortest span (just two weeks) between her first and second WTA titles, doing so approximately 68 months (and still counting) faster than Karolína Muchová.

Ferro, Fiona (FRA) filed a formal complaint against her former coach, Pierre Bouteyre, alleging rape and sexual assault committed between 2012 and 2015. After more than 18 months of the initial charge, the investigating judge ordered last September that Bouteyre stand trial before a criminal court. He appealed the decision, with a ruling expected by the end of last year; however, there have been no further public updates since.

Fett, Jana (CRO) reigns as one of the undisputed queens of Croatian tennis rivalries as she boasts a 20-5 career record against her compatriots, including wins this year over Lucija Ćirić Bagarić, Donna Vekić, and Antonia Ružić. She is beaten just once in her last 14 such encounters.

Friedsam, Anna-Lena (GER) leads in the most unsuccessful Grand Slam qualifying attempts (17) in the field without ever qualifying. The German veteran did have nine main draw wins when directly accepted.

Fruhvirtová, Linda (CZE) was the only player from the Class of 2005 to have reached a WTA semifinal before Miami this year. Collectively, the group had an underwhelming 2–8 record in WTA quarterfinals by then, until Alexandra Eala showed up in the 305.

Gálfi, Dalma (HUN) leads the WTA 125 titles (2) and finals (3) in 2025. She captured the biggest singles title of her career in Oeiras in April, then followed it up two weeks later with a dominant run in Vic—dropping just 21 games en route to the title, tied for the eighth-fewest in the WTA 125 history.

Garland, Joanna (TPE) leads the field with the highest win percentage (66-13, 83.5%) over the past 52 weeks across all levels. She was recently spotlighted in an aesthetically stunning mini-documentary titled From Stevenage to Stardom: Joanna Garland’s Unstoppable Tennis Journey, now available on YouTube.

Gibson, Talia (AUS) is one of the few players in the field to have a female coach, Codie George, a former junior player herself.

Glushko, Lina (ISR) faced a brief protest during her Auckland first round this year against Naomi Osaka, with demonstrators opposing her past Israel Defense Forces service—compulsory for Israelis.

Hartono, Arianne (NED) dabbled in mental health coaching as a junior but academic demands pulled her away, perhaps an early prelude of her decision to major in psychology in college, determined to unpack the mind on her own.

Hibino, Nao (JPN) is one of nine players in the draw who also qualified for the main draw at the first Grand Slam of the year. The three-time WTA titlist committed 55 more unforced errors than winners over the course of her three qualifying matches.

Hon, Priscilla (AUS) is a chaotic masterpiece.

Hontama, Mai (JPN) set three goals at the start of last season: to win her first WTA title, qualify for the Paris Olympics, and break into the Top 100. Unfortunately, she came up just short on all fronts and particularly close to the last one: peaking at No. 105 in August, she was just a couple of wins away from the Top 100 for multiple times.

Hunter, Storm (AUS) holds the most Top 100 wins (20) among players in the field who have never broken into the Top 100 themselves.

Inglis, Maddison (AUS) is one of the nine Australian qualifiers this year, making the Land Down Under the second most represented nation in the qualifying, only behind the host France (14).

Inisan, Eleejah (FRA) is still in lycée, pursuing her education through virtual classes alongside a demanding tennis schedule that occupies most of her time.

Inoue, Hina (USA) once battled through a four-and-a-half-hour U14 girls’ quarterfinal at Eddie Herr. At 5–5 in the deciding-set tiebreak, her opponent called a ball out but overruled in. Deeming it a third overrule, the umpire issued a point penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct and ended the match3. The tournament referee intervened, citing only a warning under ITF rules. Play resumed. Inoue prevailed 10–8.

Ishii, Sayaka (JPN) entered the IMG Academy in Florida at 16, partly because she wanted to distance herself from the shadow of her baseball-star father. For a long time, people referred to her simply as “Takuro Ishii’s daughter.” But the former junior’s No. 5 is determined to be recognized on her own terms—as a tennis player whose father happened to play baseball.

Ito, Aoi (JPN) is the highest-ranked player yet to debut in a Grand Slam main draw, a milestone that Alexandra Eala and Emiliana Arango, both ahead of her in the WTA rankings, are set out to attain in a week.

Janicijevic, Séléna (FRA) is one of two players of Serbian descent in the draw not representing Serbia, the other being Marina Stakusic.

Jiménez Kasintseva, Victoria (AND) comes from Andorra, a landlocked nation on the Iberian Peninsula. The only other Andorran ranked in the Top 1000 on either Tour4 was her father, Joan Jiménez Guerra, who reached No. 505 on the ATP Tour in 1999 and coached her in her youth.

Jones, Francesca (GBR), a self-evident clay-court specialist, has contested all 16 of her career finals (9-7) on the dirt. Prior to last year, she had never recorded a single win on grass at any level, with just one ITF win on carpet and one Tour-level win on hard court.

Juvan, Kaja (SLO) took a break briefly in April 2023 following the loss of her father, and then a longer hiatus starting January 2024. After a year away, she is ready to return to tennis. “Butterflies are always there,” she said in an interview at the start of 2025, reflecting on the year ahead. Four months later, she reached her first final in three years at the WTA 125 Saint-Malo.

Kaji, Haruka (JPN) is a lefty, or maybe righty? When she first picked up a racket, she tried holding it left-handed, but her right hand said, “Hey, I’m stronger!” So she switched to right-handed tennis. Meanwhile, pencils and chopsticks bow to the left hand, but pens? Those stay loyal to the right.

Kawa, Katarzyna (POL) was denied the opportunity to compete in Roland Garros qualifying five years ago after testing positive for COVID-19, a one-off result with no follow-up testing to confirm. Two subsequent tests taken within five days returned negative. “All that remains is sorrow and hope for a better future on the tennis tour,” she wrote in the aftermath.

Klimovičová, Linda (POL) stood out as the only Linda in the WTA Top 1000 not representing Czechia (Nosková, Fruhvirtová, and Ševčíková), having switched to Poland last year alongside her peer Valeriia Olianovskaia.

Knutson, Gabriela (CZE) is one of the five Czechs in last year’s Roland Garros women’s qualifying; none of them managed to reach the final qualifying round.

Koevermans, Anouk (NED) is the daughter of Mark Koevermans, who stepped down from his position as director of Feyenoord football club four years ago following a series of threats. Reports stated that fans had attacked his home, smashing windows and smearing paint on the front door. Concern for his family’s safety took precedence, as one might expect when your front yard starts resembling a war zone.

Korpatsch, Tamara (GER) won first her Tour title at the WTA 250 Cluj-Napoca 2023 despite a broken sesamoid bone, a small, poorly vascularized bone in the foot known for its slow healing process. From the second round onward, she competed with heavy taping and painkillers to manage the persistent pain.

Kraus, Sinja (AUT) probably did not realize it at the time, but when she lost in the semis of the 2017 European Youth Summer Olympic Festival, it was to someone who would go on to become a WTA 1000 finalist. She could definitely pat herself on the back for that.

Küng, Leonie (SUI) was the first qualifier to reach a Wimbledon girls’ final since Anna Chakvetadze in 2003. Both her biggest junior and pro finals so far ended in defeat to the Poles.

Langlais, Cindy (FRA), born June 23, 2009, is the youngest qualifier in the draw this year. The 15-year-old has already had a Top 200 win to her name at the W75 Saint-Gaudens last week over the sixth seed and world No. 187 Manon Léonard.

Lázaro García, Andrea (ESP) has just two Grand Slam qualifying wins to her name, but one of them was over the top seed and her tennis doppelgänger, Anna Kalinskaya5, at the 2022 Australian Open.

Léonard, Manon (FRA) is having a banner year, including winning her biggest title at the W75 Andrézieux-Bouthéon and rising to her career-best ranking of No. 176. But Roland Garros may prove a reality check: she is 7–27 in main draw matches on clay, and her three best wins on the surface have come against players ranked No. 265, No. 519, and No. 704; the rest are unranked.

Lepchenko, Varvara (USA) is the most senior player in the qualifying draw. Nearing 39, she debuted in Slam qualifying at the 2005 US Open and now, two decades on, could celebrate her birthday (May 21) mid-quest in Paris.

Lim, Jenny (FRA) was the only French player to reach the Roland Garros girls’ singles main draw two years ago, advancing through two straight-set victories. The five other French wildcard entrants in qualifying failed to win a set, collectively managing just 13 games.

Makarova, Ekaterina (RUS) is not yet a six-time Grand Slam quarterfinalist in singles.

Marčinko, Petra (CRO) is part of the Class of 2005 that includes Lucie Havlíčková, Liv Hovde, and Alex Eala to sweep all four Grand Slam junior’s singles title in 2022, the first time a single birth year achieved this feat since the Class of 1997 (featuring Ana Konjuh and Belinda Bencic) did so in 2013.

Marino, Rebecca (CAN) is one of 12 first-time WTA 125 singles champion earning their biggest title last year, which is quite a story at age 33, considering the Canadian’s multiple breaks and determined comebacks to the sport.

Maristany, Guiomar (ESP) won both the women’s singles and doubles titles at the 2022 Mediterranean Games. She is one of the four players in the field with honors in singles at the event, alongside Fiona Ferro (Silver, 2018), Veronika Erjavec (Bronze, 2018), and her final opponent, Nuria Brancaccio.

Martić, Petra (CRO) has the second most Grand Slam main draw wins (53) in the field, trailing only to Sara Errani (65).

Masarova, Rebeka (SUI) is the player with the highest clay Elo rating (1730.9) in the qualifying field, ranking 45th overall on the Tour. That makes her one of the most dangerous threats to potentially come through qualifying.

Mboko, Victoria (CAN) has enjoyed a sensational breakout season so far, compiling an impressive 37–5 record across all competitions, including a season-opening streak of 42 consecutive completed set wins. Her milestones this year include senior Billie Jean King Cup debut, first WTA 1000 main draw victory, and a run to the biggest final of her career at the WTA 125 Parma. The teenage Canadian also leads the tour in both ITF titles (5) and finals reached (5) this season.

Mikulskytė, Justina (LTU) hails from Lithuania and is one of the four women in the draw representing nations still seeking their first Grand Slam main draw victory, alongside Victoria Jiménez Kasintseva (Andorra), Kathinka von Deichmann (Liechtenstein), and Raluka Șerban (Cyprus).

Monnet, Carole (FRA) usually does not compete in tournaments in France in the last few months in the year, either opting to play in North Africa or South America instead, but last year marked her first such domestic swing in eight seasons.

Mpetshi Perricard, Daphnée (FRA) is the only player yet to record a win against the field (0-2).

Naef, Céline (SUI) is no longer coached by her mother, who has stepped aside in March this year to make way for Dimitri Zavialoff, the formative coach behind Stan Wawrinka and credited with revitalizing the careers of Timea Bacsinszky and Johanna Konta.

Niemeier, Jule (GER) was part of the German Billie Jean King Cup team nominated for the April qualifiers. One week later at the WTA 500 Stuttgart, all four main draw wildcards went to players from that very team. Remarkably, they were all placed in the same quarter of the draw—a statistical likelihood of just 0.413%. To add to the coincidence, the only other German in the draw also happened to be there.

Okamura, Kyōka (JPN) once shared the words on the keychain she bought back in elementary school—夢叶うまで挑戦！(Keep challenging until your dream comes true!)—have stayed with her ever since. The message feels especially apt for everyone competing next week.

Osuigwe, Whitney (USA) holds the distinction of being the youngest ITF W80 champion since 2015. This record is now likely permanent, as the W80 category was discontinued in 2024.

Palicová, Barbora (CZE), an admirer of Serena Williams, paid tribute to her idol with a commanding 6-3, 6-2 victory over Karolína Muchová with the exact same scoreline as their US Open 2019 third-round encounter. Serena did manage to get the W under the lights of Arthur Ashe, but can she do it on a cold and rainy night in Shrewsbury?

Párrizas Díaz, Nuria (ESP) leads the field in number of ITF singles titles (24). She has also won three WTA 125s.

Pigossi, Laura (BRA) has a particular affection for Bogotá, where she has recorded more WTA main draw wins (8) than in all other cities combined (7). Truly, La Atenas Suramericana feels like home.

Ponchet, Jessika (FRA) famously, or infamously, once lost a match leading 6–0, 5–0, 40–30.

Preston, Taylah (AUS) became the sixth youngest player to claim a WTA 125 doubles title, partnering with Maya Joint for the triumph in Cancún this year. They are only the second teenage duo to secure a doubles crown at this level. Back in May last year, they were also the first Australian pair aged 18 or under to both rank inside the singles Top 200 since Jelena Dokic and Alicia Molik in 2000.

Pridankina, Elena (RUS) comes from a tennis-rich family, and that’s probably another understatement. Her father, Ivan Pridankin, coached Daniil Medvedev during his teenage years, while her mother, Anna Pridankina, a former player herself, was coached by Julia Bekeshchenko, who also took part in her daughter’s tennis journey and has worked with two-time junior Grand Slam singles champion Alina Korneeva as well as 2025 Petits As champion Ekaterina Dotsenko.

Prozorova, Tatiana (RUS) was one of the standout players to launch into 2025 with an impressive form, having won her first twelve matches and looking unstoppable as she bageled Diana Shnaider in the first set of her 13th before the world No. 13 staged a comeback. Since then, she has lost three consecutive openers on clay but did stop the bleeding by reaching the Saint-Gaudens final last week.

Radivojević, Lola (SRB) has taken part in the longest tiebreak of the Tour this year in the first round of qualifying at the Australian Open, edging Heather Watson 16-14 in the second set after squandering seven set points before finally converting on her eighth.

Riera, Julia (ARG) making her Grand Slam main draw debut remains my favorite memory from last year’s Roland Garros qualifying. She entered on a 14–3 clay run in 2024; this year, a meager 4–5 so far.

Rodionova, Arina (AUS) has the most Grand Slam qualifying pedigree in the field, with 4 qualifications from 42 appearances.

Romero Gormaz, Leyre (ESP) finished third at the 2018 European Junior U16 Championships, when Paula Badosa presented her with the honorary diploma on site. Four years later, in a fitting twist, she was passed, once again from Badosa, her first Billie Jean King Cup nomination, following the latter’s withdrawal.

Rouvroy, Margaux (FRA) is the only one of the three one-handed backhand players in the field, alongside Jessika Ponchet and Kathinka von Deichmann.

Ružić, Antonia (CRO) is the first Croatian girl to win the European Junior U18 Championships in singles, still one of the most cherished memories in her tennis journey.

Ryser, Valentina (SUI), an indoor specialist, made her Grand Slam debut at the Wimbledon qualifying last year as a late replacement for a withdrawal. She capitalized on the opportunity, edging her her first two opponents before falling narrowly to Robin Montgomery in the final round. Each of her matches during that run featured a tiebreak.

Saito, Sara (JPN) has trained and practiced at the same tennis academy since sixth grade.

Šalková, Dominika (CZE) has never lost a final in her career yet (6-0). Five of the six opponents she faced in the final will also feature in this edition of Roland Garros: Antonia Ružić, Loïs Boisson, Lea Bošković, Talia Gibson, and Maja Chwalińska.

Sasnovich, Aliaksandra (BLR), a.k.a. the Bagel Queen, has been on a carb-free streak—no bagels served or swallowed in the last 52 weeks.

Saville, Daria (AUS), who is not receiving a wildcard from Tennis Australia by default this time, is one of the only three Australian women to have multiple wins at a single edition of Roland Garros as a reciprocal wildcard, along with Alicia Molik (2006) and Jarmila Wolfe (2010).

Sawangkaew, Mananchaya (THA) holds the record as the youngest Thai woman to win a professional singles title (15 years, 307 days).

Seidel, Ella (GER) qualified for the main draw of a Grand Slam on her very first attempt at last year’s Australian Open. She plays exactly like the name of her sponsorship, BOSS.

Selekhmeteva, Oksana (RUS) has once half-joked about chasing Margaret Court’s Grand Slam tally, clearly an inspiration to her fellow 2003-born Scandinavian who fancied himself the one to dethrone a certain Spaniard at Roland Garros reign. They are only slightly behind (combined progress before 23rd birthdays: 0/40).

Semeņistaja, Darja (LAT) is not a Top 100 player yet, but has been casually dating the Top 130 for 45 weeks since the start of last season. Her 5-30 record against the Top 130 club might explain some of the hesitation. Notably, four of those five wins came against Spanish speakers, could this be the Latvian’s secret linguistic formula for unlocking her breakthrough?

Șerban, Raluka (CYP) holds the most qualifying attempts (14) without a single Grand Slam main draw appearance in the field, either through qualifying or direct entry.

Sharma, Astra (AUS) is the eternal empress of Bonita Springs, the de facto GOAT of this sport, and omnipotent ruler of all she surveys, except for Tennis Australia’s reciprocal wild card. Craig Tiley, what are you smoking over there?

Shi, Han (CHN) picked up her first WTA main draw win last year in Guangzhou, her home turf. She probably wished for a bigger crowd to cheer her on, but weekday attendance was thin, after the tournament relocated from downtown to Nansha, a 90-minute drive away. In contrast, the semifinals and the final on the weekend drew a packed house.

Shibahara, Ena (JPN) is 43–25 (63.2%) in singles main draw and 31–18 in doubles (63.3%) since the start of 2024 across all competitions. So much for the “doubles specialist”—the singles résumé is starting to file for equal billing.

Shymanovich, Iryna (BLR), currently Belarus’ No. 4 in the WTA rankings, claimed her only Grand Slam main draw win at the Roland Garros two years ago by defeating Panna Udvardy. She then pushed the fellow countrywoman Aryna Sabalenka to a competitive 5-7 first set in the next match.

Sierra, Solana (ARG) is currently the highest-ranked Argentinian woman in singles (No. 111). At this time last year, La Albiceleste had three players inside the Top 100.

Snigur, Daria (UKR) has long shown an aversion to clay, only playing her first non-Roland Garros Tour-level match on the surface this year in Madrid qualifying. That discomfort is further reflected by the fact that she has qualified for every Grand Slam except Roland Garros.

Sobolieva, Anastasiia (UKR) has a unique sponsor, LEORÊVER, a California-based activewear brand. She is the first and only female tennis player repping the company.

Staksuic, Marina (CAN) has as many Billie Jean King Cup titles as the current WTA Top 14 combined.

Starodubtseva, Yuliia (UKR), a.k.a Slam Qualies GOAT, is the first woman in the Open Era to qualify for all four Grand Slams in a single season and one of the last two players (alongside Katie Volynets) to have qualified for four consecutive Grand Slams. She leads the field with a staggering 80.0% qualifying success rate.

Stefanini, Lucrezia (ITA) has an adorable Sheltie—seriously, what a handsome pup!

Stojanović, Nina (SRB) found herself just outside the Roland Garros qualifying cutoff six years ago, a frustrating near-miss. But instead of dwelling on it, she made a run to the quarterfinals at the WTA 250 in Nuremberg one week before Paris, and went on to break into the Top 100 for the first time by season’s end.

Tararudee, Lanlana (THA) has hovered within the Grand Slam qualifying cutoff for the last five but has managed just one win across those appearances.

Țig, Patricia Maria (ROU) actually started out favoring hard courts before ultimately finding more success on clay. The shift was partly shaped by the abundance of clay-court tournaments in Europe during the early stages of her career. Over time, she also came to understand that hard courts, less forgiving on movement and requiring quicker reflexes, placed more strain on her joints.

Townsend, Taylor (USA) is one of the rare serve-and-volleyers in today’s women’s game. At 16, she was the world’s top junior, but the USTA threatened to withdraw its support unless she lost weight, pressuring her into an eight-week fitness program and denying her a main draw wildcard to that year’s home Slam. In response, she reached the girls’ singles quarterfinals and captured the doubles title. The two-time doubles Slam champion shared her story in The Players’ Tribune, laying bare the pain and resilience behind the headlines. I have read it a few times. I think I will probably read it again.

Udvardy, Panna (HUN) reached out to several tennis-enthusiast celebrities early in her career in hopes of building a more sustainable support team. Redfoo readily offered his support, and with his sponsorship, she was able to hire a personal coach. Within a year, Udvardy rose from outside the Top 300 to become a regular presence on the Tour.

Valentová, Tereza (CZE), last year’s Roland Garros junior champion, is set to make her WTA main draw debut, an opportunity she narrowly missed in Prague in 2024 after a late withdrawal. She enters with the fourth-highest Elo rating (1760.8) in the field.

Vandewinkel, Hanne (BEL), still in search of her first professional win in France, comes to Paris with some momentum, having reached two W75 semifinals during this year’s clay swing.

Vögele, Stefanie (SUI) only came out of retirement in April this year, having been away from tennis for more than 30 months. Her penultimate Grand Slam main draw appearance at the US Open 2021 saw her lose to Emma Raducanu in the first round, a brief but historic cameo in unveiling the latter’s New York fairytale.

Von Deichmann, Kathinka (LIE) became the first player from Liechtenstein to reach the singles main draw of a Grand Slam at the 2018 US Open. It remained her only successful qualification to date.

Waltert, Simona (SUI) is nicknamed “Churer Chüeli,” a term of endearment which literally translates to “little cow from Chur,” her hometown. It is tempting to guess the fittingly charming gift the next time she wins a title at home.

Wang, Xiyu (CHN), a former junior’s singles and doubles No. 1, loves her marathon matches. Last year alone, she played 21 matches that ran over two hours, including her second-round loss to Laura Siegemund in Hua Hin 2, which lasted 4 hours and 9 minutes, making it the fifth-longest WTA match of the Open Era.

Watson, Heather (GBR) is the most senior Grand Slam girls’ singles winner in the field, having succeeded at the US Open 2009, although she has yet to crack the code at Roland Garros, having never progressed beyond the second round in either juniors or the pros.

Wei, Sijia (CHN) comes into her second Roland Garros qualifying with a five-match losing streak on clay, an ominous sign. Last year, she failed to capitalize on a favorable draw, defeating Lily Miyazaki in the opening round, but failed to catch Jil Teichmann at her rock bottom.

Yao, Xinxin (CHN) isn’t just familiar with Monastir—she practically pays rent there. Of her first 45 pro events, 39 were played in the Tunisian seaside town, also accounting for 115 of her first 132 matches spanning from October 2021 to October 2022.

Zakharova, Anastasia (RUS) has the second most beautiful serve in the field, trailing only to Sara Errani.

Zhang, Shuai (CHN) is one of the only two players who have reached the second week at every Grand Slam in the field, alongside her one-time doubles partner, Petra Martić.

Zidanšek, Tamara (SLO) will soon celebrate the anniversary of her dreamy Roland Garros semifinal run. How many years ago was it? 1438 days, if you are counting, which makes it feel a lot longer.

Le Fiasco Français

It has been a dire year for French women’s tennis. When the Roland Garros women’s singles main draw entry list was released two weeks ago, only Varvara Gracheva and Caroline Garcia made the initial cutoff—marking the first time since 1925, across 95 stagings as a Grand Slam, that fewer than three French women have gained direct acceptance.

The statistical low is, of course, muddied by a string of unfortunate injuries—most recently Clara Burel, who, already missing the first quarter of the season, tore her anterior cruciate ligament during a Billie Jean King Cup regional tie against Turkey’s Ayla Aksu. Still, it is a precarious slide, especially when you consider they:

• Lifted the Billie Jean King Cup just six years ago;

• Are only recently removed from the Garcia-Mladenovic era;

• Appear alarmingly thin for players born in 2003–2007; and

• Foster a thriving landscape for men’s tennis.

But there are some promises in that 2003-2007 bracket. Tiantsoa Rakotomanga Rajaonah (2005) was just a match win away from becoming the eighth player born in or after 2005 to reach a WTA semifinal in Rouen this year. Beyond the results, what has stood out for Sarah are her visible improvements from the serve to the more efficient, shortened backhand swing.

Loïs Boisson (2003) was poised for a breakthrough last year, riding a stellar 23-1 clay court run, before a devastating injury in the first round of WTA 125 Paris abruptly ended her momentum, just two weeks before her highly anticipated main draw wildcard entry at Roland Garros.

Another ACL. Another body betrayed at the edge of something new.

After years of following women’s football, I know this feeling all too well.

Ostapenkovian Overture

Jelena Ostapenko has gone 4–0 against Top 10 opponents this season, 6–6 against players ranked #11–#50, and 2–3 against those outside the Top 100. This creates a peculiar inverse trend: Using the WTA ranking as an estimator (which is not very sound), her results seem to improve as the quality of her opponents rises. A similar pattern emerges with Amanda Anisimova, who is 9–0 against the Top 40 but only 4–7 against players ranked #41–#100.

In stark contrast, Elise Mertens has struggled against the top dogs. She is 0–7 against the Top 10 this year so far and just 2–23 in her last 25 matches against Top 10 players, with her only wins in this stretch coming from #3 Jessica Pegula (2023 Roland Garros) and #8 Daria Kasatkina (2023 Miami).

And she is 19–2 against everyone else.

More on Mertens

Mertens has several notably lopsided head-to-head records, though not quite on the scale of Daria Kasatkina’s struggles. Her most well-known mismatch is a 2–10 record against Aryna Sabalenka. Other challenging matchups include Elena Rybakina (1–5), Caroline Garcia (2–5), and Sorana Cîrstea (0–3), with some shared traits evident in the Sabalenka clash. She also has some difficulties facing midrange-hybrid players like Coco Gauff (0–4), which isn’t entirely surprising given Gauff’s capability of accelerating the rallies, but 2–6 against Kasatkina is a bit out there.

Nonetheless, Mertens’ consistency in Grand Slams deserves greater recognition. Earlier this year at the Australian Open, she became one of just four players to win at least one match in every AO since 2020, joining Iga Świątek, Elena Rybakina, and Danielle Collins. Mertens is also one of only five players—alongside Świątek, Sabalenka, Gauff, and Rybakina—to reach the third round at Roland Garros in each of the last four editions. More specifically, her active streak of nine consecutive Grand Slam main draw appearances with wins ties her with Rybakina, and only Świątek (21) boasts a longer streak.

The Belgian has carved out a distinctive balance in her Slam performance. With an average of 2.156 matches won per main draw, she reliably reaches the third round, though her progress often stalls there. This puts her at 13th highest expected win among active players, with 10 of the 12 ahead of her being Grand Slam champions (exceptions are Elina Svitolina and Mirra Andreeva). Interestingly, she is ahead of several heavyweights like Zheng Qinwen (2.077), Jessica Pegula (2.042), Ons Jabeur (2.033), Karolína Muchová (2.000), and Paula Badosa (1.900) who have been Slam staples in recent years. Currently, Mertens still holds a tiny advantage over Emma Navarro (2.111), but if the latter continues her impressive Slam form from last year, that lead may soon vanish.

Emma’s Epistemology

Now that we have mentioned Navarro, I will quickly touch on her as well. A frequent comparison for the Cavalier, especially early in her post-Virginia career, is Jessica Pegula, and if the latter is the Steady Eddy of the tour, Navarro may come across as a younger incarnate of that consistency—perhaps even more efficient in Grand Slams, at least based on last year’s performances. Navarro has impressively reached the quarterfinals in three of four Grand Slams after only having participated in 9 main draws. Next month in Paris, she has the chance to complete the final piece of her puzzle: If she reaches the quarterfinals, she will only trail Venus Williams (6) among active players for the fewest Grand Slam main draws required to reach a quarterfinal at every Slam. For context, here are some other notable names: Świątek needed 18 tries, Sabalenka 21, Azarenka 28, Kvitová 30, and, of course, the canonical tough draw in Slams, Kanepi, at 53.

Inklings of Iva

The USTA has been offering a main draw singles wildcard to one American man and woman for Roland Garros main draw each year since 2012, awarded based on their performances in clay-court tournaments during a designated timeframe known as the “Roland Garros Wild Card Challenge.” On the women’s side, players can earn points from up to three tournaments within a five-week window, which includes all W35-level and above red-clay and Har-Tru events.

Iva Jovic currently leads the race with 130 points after winning Charlottesville in the Week 4 of the Challenge, making her the sixth youngest ever to claim an ITF W100 singles title while also pushing her past Julieta Pareja (116 points), who had reached the Bogotá semifinals in her WTA debut. If Jovic finishes at the top by the end of next week (she is set to compete this week in the W100 at Bonita Springs, Florida), it would echo Sachia Vickery’s journey last year as she surged to the lead toward the Challenge’s conclusion.

Jovic’s journey to her first reciprocal wildcard for the Australian Open also mirrors that of McCartney Kessler’s from last year. Neither player technically won the wildcard challenge, but those leading the points tally already were granted direct entry into the main draw by the end. However, Jovic will not follow this same route to Wimbledon. With no reciprocal agreement in place between the USTA and the All England Club, and the main draw cutoff date for entry falling before Roland Garros begins—where she is #119 now in the live WTA rankings with soon-to-drop W75 Zephyrhills final points from last year—she will likely need to qualify for Wimbledon instead.

Let’s hold off on the big picture for now, because Jovic has the opportunity to carve her own path imminently at Roland Garros, potentially becoming the second American woman of the 21st century to win a match in each of her first five Tour-level main draws, joining Caroline Dolehide. The American reciprocal wildcard has yet to see a second-week appearance, with the best result being a third-round showing by Taylor Townsend in 2014—another high-hanging fruit for the seventeen-year-old to aim for.

Rybakina Reconstructed

There have been obvious signs of Elena Rybakina’s serve regression this season, indisputably her biggest weapon, but the concerning dip in her return game also deserves closer scrutiny. Across 26 matches this year, she is only converting 43.6% of return points. While this might seem marginally better than 2023’s 42.9% and only slightly lower than 2024’s 44.1%, it is important to note that the exclusion of three matches alone—against #293 Emerson Jones, #191 Iva Jovic, and #684 Yuliana Lizarazo, arguably the stats-padding oppositions (sorry Iva)—drops RPW% down to a more troubling 42.0%.

Given this context, it’s more intuitive to infer that Rybakina’s five-match rolling average for return points won% since Doha this year has been modest at best:

42.8%, 44.2%, 43.3%, 43.0%, 43.7%, 41.5%, 39.5%, 41.9%, 43.0%, 42.9%, 40.8%, 42.0%, 44.0%, 43.0%, 41.2%

While I don’t have a RPW% breakdown related to Rybakina’s initial return position, the knee-jerk advice to push for a more aggressive return seems untenable. Sure, it might generate additional pressure on demand, but it also risks throwing off the fluidity of Rybakina’s return of serves and serve plus-ones and opening up even more space if she is already caught out of position. If anything, it might be worth considering to back off just a touch, a shift seen to partially address the expectation gap in return games that have complicated the Samsonova matchup for her in the past. Historically, Rybakina—at least before this year—has rarely been overpowered, even by the likes of Aryna Sabalenka and Petra Kvitová. However, on the few occasions when she was, inviting space would at least offer more options, especially during 1-3 shot rallies, rather than insistently trying to take space.

A Plural Playground

Although I don’t harbor a specific affection for clay, I do find it intriguing how it seems to always draw out a vast array of playing styles, like in chess where multiple gambits are possible (though it is also beginning to converge a bit more now).

Consider the winners vs. unforced errors graphics from the first two rounds of last year’s Roland Garros. In retrospect, I should have exercised caution with the labels, as they stem from only two matches—statistically, they carry the weight of a coin flip in assessing a player’s overall game (and can sometimes mirror each other by chance). Yet there is something satisfying in the chaos of players navigating the same terrain but in entirely different ways. And here is where I address the elephant in the room: Net winner differential is often treated as the ultimate marker of match quality (see the Alcaraz-Fils Monte Carlo debate), but don’t let those numbers lead you to dismiss an entire match.

The “blockbuster” Round 1 between Chloé Paquet and Diana Shnaider was probably not a pristine showcase of net winners, but it did reveal some insights into Paquet’s buildup patterns and the whereabouts her errors would creep in (which were minimal in this match). The Frenchwoman then upset Kateřina Siniaková, playing a drastically different match to advance to the third round, becoming one of the tournament’s unexpected stories. Could her 43 extra unforced errors over winners foreshadow her success to the tournament? Or did they lead us to quickly dismiss these as signs of unwatchable play? Relying solely on high-level statistics—and, to some extent, even granular, contextless technical or tactical metrics—tends to flatten the narrative, often obscuring the true nature of the contest.

With that I will spare you from my abundant alliterations.

A Player’s Ceiling

The discourse surrounding a player’s “ceiling” has seen a resurgence yet much of this conversation is rooted in a reductive premise: the idea that a player’s potential is directly proportional to how frequently they end rallies with their own hand—whether through winners or unforced errors. This narrative tends to favor those who play with relentless aggression, often mistaking intent for outcome.

At first glance, the line of reasoning appears logical. However, tennis, much like football, is a percentage-based game. In football, the concept of expected goals (xG) is used to assess the quality of a scoring opportunity. Tennis, too, has its analog—let’s call it xShot: the likelihood that a particular shot, executed from a specific position with a specific shot type, moves the player closer to winning the point.

Crucially, “winning the point” does not always require a clean winner. More often, it’s a gradual, probabilistic process—each shot incrementally shifting the rally’s dynamic, nudging the odds in one’s favor. This encompasses everything from spatial awareness to anticipatory judgment, from subtle court positioning to the orchestration of cumulative pressure. In this context, we might imagine a metric akin to post-hit xShot—an analog to football’s post-strike xG—where the value of a shot is assessed not as a discrete variable, but in terms of its continuous impact on the opponent’s options.

The fixation on outright winners obscures a more nuanced narrative. Many points that culminate in forced errors are, in fact, the result of deliberate construction: rallies built with discipline and foresight, yet rendered less salient in the eye test by the fact that the final touch comes from the opponent’s racquet.

Aggressive players often dominate discussions of a “ceiling.” Yet Sloane Stephens’s 2017 US Open run illustrates “unplayability” in another dimension: her brilliance lay not in unrelenting assault (though her aggressive inside-out forehands, undeniably the shot of the tournament, certainly rose to the occasion), but in the composed resilience to absorb pressure, recalibrate strategy, and quietly seize control. She elevated her “xShot” not with an attempt of a barrage of winners, but through decentralized highs with moments of normalized defense and negative transitions, which constitute an equally formidable ceiling.

It brings to mind the familiar Christian prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

While there will always be countless praise in a player’s ability to dictate, less attention is given to the discernment required to know when not to.

Vika the Victim

One of the reasons I created the @OptaLena account was an urge to “do it right” after spotting a factual error during Stuttgart last year—an issue that felt emblematic of various problems in how Opta structures and presents its data.

At the time, Opta claimed that Elena Rybakina was the first player since Naomi Osaka (2019–2020) to win ten consecutive three-set Tour-level matches. But this simply wasn’t the case. The actual title belongs to Zheng Qinwen who achieved the feat from the 2023 US Open through to the 2024 Australian Open. Even if one were to disregard her wins at the now-defunct 2023 Elite Trophy—though it was a sanctioned WTA event—Zheng still held an uninterrupted streak stretching to the 2024 Miami Open. This is not a complicated error to avoid and a basic filter would have surfaced the correct player.

But that incident reflects a deeper concern I have with Opta’s data selectability, particularly in how it classifies event statistics on the WTA Tour. If you follow the account closely, you will see that they often cite WTA 1000 records “since 2009.” The logic behind this cutoff is, presumably, that 2009 marked the restructuring of the WTA calendar, when Tier I events became Premier Mandatory and Premier 5. But the “WTA 1000” branding didn’t exist until 2021, so applying it retroactively to pre-2021 tournaments makes the label a misnomer. If Opta truly wants to respect historical continuity, it could trace back to the original Tier I era (1990–2008) or even the Category 1 events of 1988–1990, rather than arbitrarily starting its count in 2009.

This revisionist framing has real consequences, especially for players whose careers began before 2009. By limiting “WTA 1000” statistics to post-2009 data, Opta inadvertently downplays their achievements. A recent example illustrates the issue: following Doha this year, Victoria Azarenka (169), Caroline Wozniacki (169), and Agnieszka Radwańska (168) led WTA 1000 hard-court wins ahead of Kvitová (141); that gap would be smaller from Opta’s truncated win tally.

If we follow Opta’s precedent, just imagine what would happen when the WTA inevitably rebrands again. If, say, the Tour renames WTA 1000 events to WTA 999.5 tomorrow, would Mirra Andreeva be hailed as the most decorated player at this level in the future? Would every statistical comparison henceforth require a fresh qualifier, i.e. “since April 2025”?

I do keep my own database as a sanity check for when Opta slips up, but I also credit them for pioneering narrative-driven event statistics, and that’s exactly what I’m aiming to do with @OptaLena: deliver a diverse, creative, and, above all, truthful set of statistics, always grounded in context. I try to avoid sensationalism, even if it likely grabs more attention while distorting the story. Take Rybakina’s 2025 season: both “1–5 vs. Top 15” and “1–5 vs. Top 30” are technically accurate, with the latter painting a more negative status quo, but it should be noted that she hasn’t yet faced anyone ranked 16–30 so far this year.

Context is everything.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

While we are on the topics of tennis analytics and statistics, I’m equally captivated by the broader conversation around the sport, provided it remains kind and thoughtful. Tennis has always been, at its heart, a spectator’s game: watching is a shared experience, less an exercise in solitary analysis than a communal act of interpretation.

That’s not to say subjective insights lack value—there’s undeniable heuristic power in individual perspectives. But it’s in the interplay of viewpoints, where questions collide and converge, that our understanding really deepens. A chorus of voices, each fueled by genuine passion, creates a narrative richness no single lens can achieve alone.

Consider my critique of WTA ruling inconsistencies as I recently took a magnifying glass to the WTA’s rulebook and to the rankings it supposedly governs. Alongside some equally curious friends, we spotted a few cases where a player’s zero-pointer vanished from their tally. A typical exchange went something like:

“Why was Player X’s zero-pointer excluded here?” “Maybe there’s an exception we’re missing?” “Unlikely, look at Player Y’s point breakdown.” “Good catch. Let’s run a quick screening.”

Even when debates grow impassioned, they tend to culminate in greater clarity, mutual respect, and an expanded appreciation for the intricacies of the sport. You almost always walk away having learned something new.

Here’s to enriching your tennis journey, and your life, with the joy of shared curiosity and camaraderie.

I find immense pleasure in watching Mia Ristić compete.

Her matches unfold with a subtle yet distinct atmosphere as if stepping into an uncannily familiar parallel universe. Here, rhythms shift slightly off-kilter—every movement, every strike of the ball seems governed by a cadence alien to the WTA Tour. The faint score announcements echoing through ITF tournaments sound muffled, as though separated by an impassable barrier, hazy and distant.

Consciousness fractures in this liminal space. Try as one might to parse the logic of her play, language falters; emotions and analysis dissolve into abstraction, consumed by temporal fissures that defy capture. I felt this most acutely during her first-round match at last September’s W75 Kuršumlijska Banja. Midway through the fourth game, monsoon rains lashed the clay, dissolving the court’s geometry into liquid abstraction. Play continued, reckless and sublime, until the set’s conclusion forced respite—three and a half games etched into memory like a fever dream, both women drenched to their marrow.

Ristić’s backhand is her lodestar. Were it a repository of arcana, she could inventory its contents blindfolded: the coiled wires, rusted hinges, half-empty jars, with each artifact aligning to her command. Were it a living creature, she’d anticipate its stride, its breath, the sinuous arch of its spine. This stroke is a dialogue of instinct, honed through years of dismantling textbook form. She discards follow-throughs like outdated receipts, and contorts her posture into near-rebellion. True mastery lies not in obedience to kinetic dogma but in the audacity to fracture and rebuild.

Her forehand, by contrast, remains a hesitant guest. Though mechanically functional, it betrays no such symbiosis. Each unit turn is summoned through patient negotiation as if coaxing a skittish ally into battle. Where the backhand flows unbidden, the forehand stutters, a fragile dialectic between discipline and doubt.

This duality mirrors her linguistic cadences: Serbian spills from her lips with syncopated vitality, while English diffuses into cautious restraint. One imagines she regards the Tour’s obligatory interviews as ephemera, mere static against her immutable focus. Perhaps victory alone holds translation.

Post-match, the court bore the storm’s fingerprints. Ball marks fossilized in clay, puddles glinting like shattered glass. It recalled coastal typhoons that ravaged and vanished, leaving only scattered debris as testament. Such tempests defy prediction; their arrival fractures mundanity, and their departure leaves the world subtly rearranged. Rain-soaked clay, after all, is a Serbian romance. It strips the game of pretense, reducing order to primal sludge, a chaos as fertile as Ristić’s backhand combinations, which herd opponents into errors with lupine precision. Here, uncertainty thrums with latent metamorphosis: a point, a set, a cosmos teetering on reinvention.

Yesterday, she exorcised ghosts. Against Justina Mikulskytė in the Billie Jean King Cup regionals, Ristić conquered a psychological barrier in a matchup that had haunted three prior defeats within eight months despite being up a set in the last two. Observers might overlook the triumph, a straight-set win belies the specter of squandered leads, of intensity fraying at the brink. For her, this was catharsis in codex form.

Serbia did not manage to top the group but secured a promotional playoffs spot, a result that seems almost incidental given their youthful roster. Averaging just 18.8 years, the squad included two players barely 30 months away from the junior version of BJKC and one still active in the current junior circuit, compared to a more seasonsed Slovenia team. Yet don’t let the number fool you: their moxie is as fierce as it is infectious, a unbridled defiance that snubs caution and smirks in the face exuding unfiltered joy that scorches everything in its path (highly recommended: watch Teodora Kostović’s celebratory dance), another strain of Serbian romance.

Perhaps it all began with a child’s scrawl. At nine, after clinching a Balkan junior title, Ristić wrote:

У ствати, сањам увек и стално. Сањам како освајам и остале планете сунчевог система а не само ХАРОН.

In truth, I dream perpetually. Not merely of conquering Charon, but all planets in the solar system.

For many, dreaming might be the recollection of many fleeting thoughts paused before the final period. For Mia, and for countless young souls emerging from a land ravaged by ethnic strife, lingering wars, and social upheaval in the contemporary history, it is an existential syntax.

I recently revisited a Guadalajara 2023 first-round clip between Anastasia Potapova and Emiliana Arango, where a contentious call sequence raises significant concerns about rule application. The Sequence of Play (SoP) is as follows:

1. Arango hits a backhand shot.

2. The Line Umpire calls it OUT.

3. Potapova hits the ball back, which lands in play.

4. The OUT call is overruled by Ana Carvalho, the Chair Umpire, who calls it IN.

5. Both players stop the play.

6. Potapova challenges the corrected call.

7. Electronic Line Review shows the ball is IN.

8. Chair Umpire gives the point to Arango, asserting that the corrected call didn’t affect Potapova’s play.

At first glance, even without consulting with the tennis rules, you might intuit that something is off here—the umpire’s correction does, in fact, affect Potapova’s play even if she proclaims otherwise. If we assume the umpire is capable of accurately describing what transpired, it then seems she holds the premise that Potapova’s failed challenge on the corrected call nullifies the fact that she has been involuntarily hindered during the point.

As per the prevailing WTA Rulebook Section VII.H.1.b:

If a call is corrected from “Out” to “Good,” then a let must be called unless the Chair Umpire determines in his/her sole discretion that the ball was a clear ace or a clear winning shot that the player could not have retrieved. If there is any reasonable possibility that the ball could have been played, then the player must be given the benefit of the doubt.

The hindrance arises from the chair umpire’s correct call from OUT to IN, and Potapova managing to retrieve the ball, as outlined in the third event of the SoP, necessitates a point replay. It is important to note that Potapova’s challenge on the umpire’s correct call does not override the hindrance; she does not pause the play to initiate the challenge, and the chair umpire could not have retroactively anticipated that she would have challenged if the line umpire’s OUT call had not occurred.

For those who have been following the WTA Tour long enough, the incident may echo a completely analogous controversy from Doha 2011, where Kader Nouni awarded a point to Lucie Šafářová after correcting an OUT call on Agnieszka Radwańska’s shot despite the Polish having reached the ball and continued the play. Nouni’s ruling, which was later deemed incorrect by the WTA and resulted in an official apology, involved a more ontological misapplication of the hindrance clause: he did demonstrate a piecewise understanding of the clause, but not its situational nuances in the larger context—the order of invocation and insertion in the rule’s adjudication (whereas the Potapova incident stemmed entirely from a factual error, either the umpire’s misinterpretation of reality or her incorrect understanding of the clause).

I have little interest in dissecting mistakes from past matches, certainly not from the one over a decade ago, especially given the already plentiful backlash surrounding it. Though I do wonder how the simple concept of sequence of play was not more broadly applied within the Rulebook to enhance its structural integrity and comprehensiveness. At present, the provision’s framework relies heavily on terminology and an intricate web of cross-references across different sections, aiming for cohesion through redundancy rather than through a streamlined SoP. By structuring a tennis point in the most exhaustive way possible, we achieve not only a more linear narrative, but also a clearer, bijective mapping between key terms, such as “hindrance”, and their contextualized definitions when referenced for umpire’s decision-making process to ensure comparability of all the parts together. A logical and actionable starting point would be to delineate distinct phases for match plays in the chronological order: the preparation phase, initiation, active play, termination, and so forth, and build from there.

There are more pressing issues within the Rulebook arising from ambiguities regarding the Sequence of Events (SoE), a procedural counterpart to SoP. These ambiguities have repercussions beyond merely compromising the integrity of the rule system; they also undermine its interpretability. Consider, for instance, Iga Świątek’s December 2024 ranking situation following the earlier revelation of her provisional suspension under Tennis Anti-Doping Programme due to testing positive for trimetazidine.

As per the applicable Rulebook Section VIII.A.4.a.iii:

If a player receives a zero (0) ranking point result while provisionally suspended under the Integrity Rules and subsequently the provisional suspension is lifted, then

(a) she must count on her ranking all applicable zero (0) ranking point results received from Grand Slams; and

(b) she is not required to count on her ranking any zero (0) ranking point results received from WTA 1000 Mandatory or WTA 500 Tournaments that occurred during her provisional suspension.

During her suspension, Świątek missed three tournaments she had automatically entered or “committed”—WTA 500 Seoul, WTA 1000 Beijing, and WTA 1000 Wuhan. The lifted suspension resulted in a nuance of ranking points calculations—whether zero-point penalties are applied or removed (see the illustration below). WTA’s computations are derivatively sound and valid, so I will not dwell on them. What is intriguing, however, is the timing: WTA implemented a ranking points adjustment on December 9, 2024, a month after Świątek competed in the WTA Finals in Riyadh, after, presumably her provisional suspension had been lifted. It would be tempting to not suspect that the procedural delay was unrelated to the suspension’s public airing in late November. Had the rules been enforced rigorously and the adjustment implemented earlier, might the sudden points deduction have prompted scrutiny regarding its origin then?

Other more trivial yet flagrant slips abound. For example, WTA delayed its decision on whether the Rome event was a Mandatory or Non-mandatory 1000 event until the literal final weeks of the 2023 season, resulting in a points discrepancy that can only be explained by an ad hoc, retroactive rule change. Similarly, the August 19, 2024 ranking of Taylor Townsend, where she attained her career-high ranking of 46, was later revised to 48 near the end of the season due to an incorrect points aggregation.

While these discrepancies may seem inconsequential—the Rome points did not affect the composition of the WTA Finals field in Cancún that year, nor did the retroactive adjustment of Townsend’s ranking affect the cutoff for the tournaments she had entered, the lack of detailed, case-specific clarifications did point to an institutional hesitance to confront or even acknowledge these errors, particularly the systematic ones, not to mention their underlying causes in the first place. In fact, independent recalculation of the WTA weekly rankings using the Rulebook’s prescribed algorithm often reveals inexplicable deviations from the “official” ranking.

But even more concerning than all of these irregularities is the apparent uncritical acceptance of them.