MELBOURNE, Australia — When Mirra Andreeva steps on to Rod Laver Arena Sunday morning in Melbourne, she will be bidding to become the first player to beat world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in Australia in 30 attempts. Andreeva, 17, already has the honor of being the last player to beat Sabalenka at a Grand Slam tournament, knocking her out of the 2024 French Open at the quarterfinal stage.
While this is a fourth-round contest, Andreeva will also be bidding to retain a singular title: the last teenager in the women’s draw at the Australian Open. Ranked world No. 15, she is already sure of retaining another one: her status as the only teenager inside the WTA Tour top 100.
“I never knew this, I think it’s pretty cool,” Andreeva said, smiling during an interview at Melbourne Park.
“Wait, are you sure I’m the only one in the top 100?” she asked.
Though the numbers sometimes do in tennis, the rankings do not lie. The next highest-ranked teenager after Andreeva is Maya Joint, the 18-year-old Australian world No. 105 who lost 6-3, 6-0 to No. 7 seed Jessica Pegula in the first round Monday. America’s Iva Jovic, 17, who is arguably the most hotly tipped teenager on the tour after Andreeva, was thumped 6-0, 6-3 by No. 6 seed Elena Rybakina in the second round.
Both players looked out of their depth, but Andreeva is more familiar with this kind of territory. She became a tennis star at the 2024 Australian Open, thrashing No. 6 seed and three-time Grand Slam finalist Ons Jabeur 6-0, 6-2 before coming back from 5-1 down in the third set against France’s Diane Parry to reach the fourth round. That year, she lost to Barbora Krejcikova.
Andreeva’s position as the sole teenager among the best 100 players in the world is the consequence of a marked change in the last 25 years. In this week of the season in 2020 there were six teenagers in the top 100, likewise in 2015; in 2000 the figure was a whopping 17, almost one in five.
From increased physicality and changes in gamestyle in women’s tennis, to WTA rule changes and developing attitudes to player health and burnout, this is the story of how women’s tennis went from being a sport of young prodigies to a tough scene for anybody under 20.
Teenage phenoms and the WTA Tour have been synonymous since its inception.
A year after its foundation in 1973, Chris Evert won the French Open at 19, starting an almost uninterrupted lineage of adolescent sensations. Tracy Austin won the 1979 U.S. Open at 16, then came Steffi Graf, who won the 1987 French Open at 17 having made her professional debut aged 13 — against Austin.
Monica Seles was 16 when she won her first Grand Slam at Roland Garros in 1990, and had eight major titles by the time she was just over 18. That same French Open saw Jennifer Capriati reach the semifinals aged 14, who was closely followed by Martina Hingis, who won three Grand Slams aged 16.
Hingis was succeeded by the Williams sisters, who won their first majors aged 17 (Serena) and having just turned 20 (Venus). Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon 2004 at 17 and since then there have been five teenage women’s Grand Slam singles champions. The most recent is Coco Gauff, who was 19 when she won the U.S. Open title in 2023.
Among the 17 teenagers in the top 100 at this stage in 2000, three of the top four were under 20. Hingis, by then 19, reached the Australian Open final but was beaten by Lindsay Davenport, ancient by comparison at 23. A quarter of a century later in Melbourne, it’s the ATP Tour that is seeing teenage breakthroughs, with Joao Fonseca (18), Jakub Mensik and Learner Tien (both 19) earning statement wins over top-10 players. But, historically, the men have lagged far behind the women in making early moves at the top of the sport. In 2000, there were five teenagers in the top 100; three in 2005, zero in 2010, and two in 2015, 2020 and 2025.
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Trying to explain a phenomenon of which she is at the center, Andreeva ascribes the changes to an evolution in tennis itself.
“I think that tennis has changed a lot in the last 20 years. The speed of the ball is different and everyone is playing so powerful and aggressive.
“I think it’s going to take a bit more time for younger players to come in, because everyone hits the ball so hard. I feel like it’s getting tougher and tougher for everyone to stay in there, stay in the point. For younger ladies, it’s also a bit tough to deal with the speed of the ball.”
Mirra Andreeva is in the fourth round of the Australian Open for the second consecutive year. (Fred Lee / Getty Images)
Andreeva’s next opponent, Sabalenka, is a perfect illustration of what she describes. Her ballstriking is so formidable that only a few of the top 100 can routinely match it, in a top 10 with a current average age of 25.4.
Andreeva’s own ability to hurt Sabalenka and other top players — she has a 4-8 record against top 10 players, but three of those losses are all against Sabalenka — is built on her exceptional court smarts and anticipation, comparable with those of Hingis, who is one of her idols. Andreeva decided to turn pro after losing an agonizing Australian Open girls final two years ago.
“After that I decided that I never, ever, ever, ever, ever want to play juniors again,” she said.
Belinda Bencic, who won a WTA 1000 title (the rung below the Grand Slams) aged 17 a decade ago is also in the fourth round in Melbourne. She also believes the level has gone up in the last 10 years. “Players are really getting consistent,” she said in a news conference this week.
“You have to be physically very prepared to kind of consistently win.”
Iga Swiatek, who won her first Grand Slam aged 19 at the 2020 French Open, agrees: “For sure it’s more physical. I think we take care of ourselves and we work harder in the gym than the previous generation.
“It’s not my opinion — it’s what I heard on tour from people that have been here 10 years ago. But I think tennis overall is evolving and you need to take care of more stuff.”
Swiatek, 23 and Sabalenka, 26, won three of last year’s four Grand Slams. Krejcikova, 29, won the other.
The recent exception to this rule, Gauff, is the first to acknowledge that she had an advantage from the jump. Though she reached the Wimbledon fourth round in 2019 when she was 15, it took her four more years to win her first major, something which players in previous generations could do earlier. Gauff had played above her age for most of her development as a player.
“I was lucky, and I was physically gifted,” she said in a news conference in Melbourne. “I was faster than a lot of girls. Maybe not stronger, but speed can take you some way.”
She also credits a “delusional” level of self-belief. “I remember I had my run at Wimbledon, and I thought I was like a slam contender afterwards,” she said.
Ola Malmqvist, who was the United States’ Tennis Association’s head of women’s tennis during Gauff’s breakout, agrees with the players that physicality and athleticism has become more intrinsic to the tour, creating a greater gulf for teen prodigies to cross. Austin, who played her last Grand Slam aged 20 because of injuries (before a brief comeback 11 years later), said in a phone interview from LA this week: “The athleticism is off the charts. People have trainers with them, physios with them.”
“Every five years there’s just more depth and more people from more countries.”
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The surfeit of teenagers enjoying huge success between the 1970s and 2000s ultimately prompted a reckoning with the consequences of talents burning brightly and early before being extinguished. Capriati, who made her debut at 13 like Graf, took two years away with mental burnout while still a teenager. Andrea Jaeger, who reached two Grand Slam finals and was the world No. 2 at 16, retired at 20, just as Austin first did, with a shoulder injury.
In 1995, the WTA Tour introduced a tournament eligibility rule based on age and set a lower limit of 14 for players to enter WTA Tour events. Andreeva, 17, can enter 16 per year; at 16 she could enter 12 and at 15 she could enter 10.
Players aged 14 to 17 have their tournament schedule and recovery plans audited by the WTA, and their support teams are required to complete online training on load management. One WTA executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships in the sport, said that that greater prize money at tournaments and better funding from federations compared with Austin’s era means there’s less pressure on youngsters to go out and start grinding to pick up cheques.
The mental burnout of players like Capriati and the physical challenges faced by those like Austin prompted a reckoning. Capping tournament entries naturally limits the number of ranking points teenagers can earn in a year, which also adds difficulty to breaking into the top 100. In a phone interview from LA, Pam Shriver, who reached the 1978 U.S. Open final at 16, said that “it’s much harder to make the quick zooms up the rankings the way we used to”.
“When I was 15, 16, I played three tournaments and I was already in the top 50. Nowadays there’s just there’s so many more players. The depth, the physicality and the age rule, those are the main reasons things have changed.”
Austin is “very glad” the rule wasn’t in place when she won her two Grand Slams as a teenager, but acknowledges that there was a much more limited understanding of athlete burnout.
“I was kind of the first. It was a learning curve for everybody,” she said.
Tracy Austin during her 1979 U.S. Open win. (Walter Iooss Jr / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
Fundamental changes aren’t just taking place among the youngest; the oldest players on the ATP and WTA Tours are getting older and staying higher in the world rankings for longer. Graf retired at 30 with 22 singles titles; Pete Sampras retired at 31. Then came the Williams sisters and the ‘Big Three’ of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, with Djokovic still inside the top 1o at 37 and Serena Williams winning her final Grand Slam title at 36.
More and more WTA Tour players are also taking mid-career breaks to have children before returning to tennis, with breakthroughs deeper into careers getting more common. Jessica Pegula (30) and Jasmine Paolini (29) both reached their first major finals in 2024.
Danielle Collins, who had one of the best seasons of her career in 2024, has bemoaned the response to her having peak success at 30.
“If you’re not a superstar at age 15, 16, 17, it’s such a shock to everybody,” she said in an interview at Wimbledon last year.
“If you have any success as a 30-year-old woman, the tennis world has very much been like, ‘Oh my gosh, is she doing well because she announced her retirement?’.
“Most people don’t reach the pinnacle of their career until later in life.”
For some players, it no longer feels like the opportunity to make it has a short expiry date. Pegula and Emma Navarro, America’s 23-year-old world No. 8, have taken a more scenic route to the top of the WTA rankings. Navarro had a stellar junior career — including a singles final and doubles title at the French Open — but wasn’t sure she wanted to be a professional tennis player. So she went to the University of Virginia for two years, and won the NCAA college tennis women’s singles title. Since fully committing to the tour in 2023, she’s shot up the rankings, helped by reaching the U.S. Open semifinals last year, and now finds herself in the world’s top 10 and the Australian Open fourth round.
Emma Navarro, like several contemporary WTA players, took her time before going pro. (Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)
“Physically and mentally I just didn’t feel ready. I knew that if I was going to go pro, I wanted to be 100 per cent committed,” she said in a news conference this week. “I knew that anything less than that wasn’t going to be enough, and I wouldn’t have the experience that I would like to have.”
Pegula, who became America’s oldest first-time slam finalist in the Open Era when she reached the U.S. Open final last year, didn’t reach the world’s top 100 until she was almost 25.
“I do think maybe people are a little bit more protective of how much girls are playing when they’re younger,” she said in a news conference in Melbourne.
Not everyone takes the same view. Jovic, who reached the second round of the U.S. Open as well as here in Melbourne, said in an interview that having played at the biggest events, going into the collegiate atmosphere wouldn’t have the same feeling. Per Austin: “The pro tour picks you — it tells you when you’re ready to move to the next level.”
That was in full evidence at the Australian Open, with Jovic’s heavy defeat to Rybakina and Joint’s loss to Pegula, who explained that part of her late development was not caution or planning, but born out of a simple and fundamental fear that all tennis players experience no matter their age.
“I don’t think I was good enough,” she said.
Most of the former players who discussed the topic share the view that the protective impact of new rules — and the tougher competition — is a net positive. Shriver, who won over 20 Grand Slam doubles titles but never reached another major singles final, suggests there was no alternative.
For players like Andreeva and Gauff, having to be patient may be frustrating, but the results for the other most talented teenagers in Melbourne suggest that taking time is the right route. As Andreeva prepares to meet Sabalenka and all she represents about what has changed in the past two decades, it’s never been harder to get teenage kicks on the WTA Tour.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Demetrius Robinson)
