MELBOURNE, Australia — When Ash Barty won the 2022 Australian Open, she became the Australian women’s player to win her home Slam in almost half a century. With a Grand Slam title on every surface and 107 consecutive weeks as world No. 1 at the time, she had planted the Australian flag at the top of women’s tennis — a position that it had historically occupied before a long fallow period.
Barty was the first Australian winner in Melbourne since Chris O’Neil in 1978, with the dominance of Margaret Court and Evonne Goolagong Cawley, who won 31 Grand Slam singles titles between them, feeling like ancient history.
Three years have passed since Barty lifted the Daphne Akhurst trophy, and it is 100 years since Akhurst won the first of her five titles at the Australasian Tennis Championships, renamed to the Australian Tennis Championships in 1927 and the Australian Open in 1969. A century on from Akhurst’s debut triumph, Australian women’s tennis finds itself in transition, with little prospect of a home player raising the trophy that bears her name.
Just a couple of months after her straight-sets win over Danielle Collins, Barty retired from tennis as the world No. 1, and the country’s place at the pinnacle of women’s tennis left with her. There are now zero Australian women in the WTA’s top 100, with the country’s No. 1 Kimberley Birrell knocking on the door at world No. 101.
The first week of this year’s Australian Open has offered a further reality check, with only three home players making it into the second round.
The country’s No. 1 and No. 3 players Birrell, 26, and Olivia Gadecki, 22, were on the wrong end of first-round thrashings, while former world No. 20 Daria Saville lost in three sets. Ajla Tomljanovic, a three-time Grand Slam quarterfinalist who was given a wildcard after returning from a serious knee injury, lost to No. 12 seed Diana Shnaider in the second round. At the same stage, Talia Gibson, world No. 150, won a single game against No. 11 seed Paula Badosa.
Destanee Aiava, who came through qualifying and knocked out world No. 91 Greet Minnen, made the deepest run. Aiava, who has worn the looks of tennis stars of yesteryear purchased on eBay throughout the tournament, took No. 10 seed Danielle Collins before the American prevailed 7-6(4), 4-6, 6-2.
Despite a bleak opening week in Melbourne, there is excitement brewing around a crop of exciting young players headed by world No. 105 Maya Joint, 18, and junior world No. 1 Emerson Jones, 16, as the country enters a new tennis cycle to complement the group of players just outside the top 100. Gadecki is world No. 106, one of 12 Australian women in the 101-200 bracket. Joint and Jones suffered heavy defeats in round one, but they were facing elite opposition — Jessica Pegula (world No 6) and Elena Rybakina (No 7).
Australian tennis was always expecting to go through a post-Barty hangover, but her three Grand Slam titles sucked attention away from the struggles of her compatriots before her sudden departure forced a reckoning far sooner than expected. Speaking to former and current players and the people at Tennis Australia (TA) tasked with turning things around, there is a feeling that things are starting to improve.
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Only two Australian women besides Barty have made the second week in Melbourne since 2011. Saville (competing under her maiden name, Gavrilova) did it in 2016 and 2017, while Casey Dellacqua, Barty’s former doubles partner, got there in 2014. Other players have been successful elsewhere, including Tomljanovic and Sam Stosur, who won the 2011 U.S. Open, but both have relatively wretched records in Melbourne. Tomljanovic, who was born in Croatia and started representing Australia in 2014, has suffered badly from injuries in recent years; Saville, who switched from Russia to represent Australia a decade ago, has had similar ill fortune.
Ash Barty became a global star in her relatively short professional career. (TPN / Getty Images)
Australia has been punching below its weight as a Grand Slam nation for some time, with just the two major winners (Barty and Stosur) on the women’s side in 44 years. Lleyton Hewitt (Wimbledon 2002) is the most recent Australian winner of a men’s singles Grand Slam, but men’s tennis has enjoyed better fortunes outside of majors. Nick Kyrgios reached the 2022 Wimbledon final and has beaten Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic during his singles career; Alex de Minaur has risen into the ATP Tour top 10 and Alexei Popyrin and Jordan Thompson have earned Grand Slam seedings.
For the men and women, performances remain light years away from the heyday of Australian tennis, when Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Roy Emerson and many more made it the centre of the tennis universe.
This is partly attributable to geopolitics and geography. After the Iron Curtain fell, tennis exploded in the former communist countries, where tennis had long been scorned as a pursuit of the bourgeoisie. Russia, the Czech Republic and Ukraine have become tennis hotbeds, especially for women. Tennis has become a more global game than the international sports Australia still dominates, such as cricket and rugby league, which have strong countries scattered across the globe but larger chasms in ability between nations than tennis.
The centralisation of tennis in Europe and the United States has exposed some of the issues that Australia’s geography presents. It is so large and so sparsely populated that creating an infrastructure that allows its top players to play together consistently is difficult; it is so far away from the new centres of the tennis universe that promising young players have to commit to spending weeks and months at a time thousands of miles away from home essentially no matter where they are playing.
Many Australian players feel they have to base themselves in Europe or America to make the tennis lifestyle work. Gadecki is living in Southfields in south-west London, close to the All England Club where Wimbledon is held, but this kind of move is not financially or emotionally viable for everyone. De Minaur is based in Spain, where he has family ties.
Rennae Stubbs, who won 60 WTA Tour doubles titles, including six majors, was able to buy a house in Florida aged 25 off the back of her success.
“Australia is so far away and for a tennis player, that’s really, really hard,” she said in an interview at Melbourne Park this week, where she is covering the Australian Open for ESPN.
“It’s incredibly expensive to go back and forth, and then you’re losing a couple of days flying and a couple more flying back. If you have a week or two off, it’s not that viable to fly back to Australia.
“You have to be pretty special to come from here, to come from such a beautiful country where life’s pretty easy and you can have some fun to really lock in and be a dedicated tennis player.”
This is the reverse of a familiar tennis narrative, in which players from less-privileged countries use sport to escape from challenges at home. The infrastructure within the country also creates problems. “It’s hard to play against people that are as good as you,” Stubbs said.
“Look at the Czech Republic: they live about five hours apart, maximum. They can drive to and from clubs and play the best of the best every single weekend,” she said, adding that a three-hour journey by train in Europe can take you to an international competition, but a three-hour journey from Melbourne won’t get a tennis player within spitting distance of another major city.
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Stosur, who was brought on as Australia’s Billie Jean King Cup captain last year, echoes this view. “It’s hard to see that level week in, week out,” she said on the Deuce podcast last month.
“We have to go away for so long on our trips and when you’re first starting, it takes time to know how to manage that, to work out how long I can go away for before I feel like I need to come home.”
Other sports are taking advantage of this by attracting promising young athletes with the opportunity to play at a high level on their doorstep. Basketball, soccer, volleyball, and netball are all popular, with Australian rules football now having professional women’s teams. “It’s not like 30 years ago where you played Aussie rules football in the winter and then swam, played cricket or tennis in the summer,” doubles legend Todd Woodbridge, who ran player development for TA when Kyrgios and Barty were rising juniors, told The Athletic last year. Barty took a career break from tennis in 2014 aged 18 to play professional cricket.
Sam Stosur (left) with Daria Saville at a Billie Jean King Cup tie against Mexico. (Chris Hyde / Getty Images)
While its geographical challenges are considerable, Australian tennis has one advantage that only three other nations enjoy: hosting a Grand Slam. As with the United Kingdom, the United States and France, revenues from the Australian Open are partially reinvested into player development, a resource worth tens of millions of dollars that countless countries will never have.
Part of TA’s bid to revitalise women’s tennis, though, focuses on lower-level tournaments. The holding of numerous 250-level, ATP Challenger, WTA 125 and ITF tournaments is a considerable factor in Italy’s recent tennis success, allowing promising young players to challenge the best in the world at home. Tim Jolley, who leads strategy and performance for TA, has focused on catching players early, partnering with private academies to develop a performance program for players between the ages of six and 10. There’s also been a greater investment in tournaments at junior and senior levels. “Using that (Italy) as a reference has been a strategic priority for the last couple of years,” Jolley said on a video call in January.
Paul Kilderry, director of professional tennis at TA, has formalised Australia’s relationship with prestigious international tournaments too. Australia is newly sending its best players to the 12-and-under and 14-and-under Orange Bowl, held in Florida and a shop window for the best young talent in the sport. TA is also sending its charges to less clement locations. Australian youngsters this week played an event in Bolton in the north west of England, where temperatures have regularly been sub-zero of late.
“It toughens them up — if there was a Siberian Open we would send them there,” Kilderry said on the same video call, laughing.
One of the biggest changes in the last few years has been centralizing the program for the country’s best talents at the Queensland Tennis Centre in Brisbane. When Barty was coming through, the National Tennis Centre was in Melbourne, but there were also state hubs. Barty moved to the Melbourne centre from her home in Queensland as a 16-year-old in early 2013, soon after it had opened. She was already a junior Wimbledon champion and was playing tour events. Her first break at 18 and her ultimate exit from tennis, declaring herself “spent” underline the challenges Australians face when trying to make it on the tour.
Of the new crop, Jones, Joint, Gibson, Gadecki and the 19-year-old world No. 172, Taylah Preston, have all been based at the Queensland Tennis Centre. TA has also introduced a roster of travelling support staff — including strength-and-conditioning coaches, physiotherapists and even analytics experts — to support Australian players on the road.
“Australian tennis is built on camaraderie going back to the 1960s,” Kilderry says, referring to the exploits of Laver, Emerson et al. Men’s tennis has developed this kind of camaraderie between De Minaur, Thompson, Popyrin, Kyrgios and Thanasi Kokkinakis; when asked about their development as a group at the Australian Open, the current crop of Australian women said that they are on their way to achieving the same kind of closeness.
“We all message each other after matches, win or loss. It’s really nice to be a part of that,” Joint said in a news conference.
Maya Joint is highly regarded on the Australian tennis circuit. (William West / AFP via Getty Images)
The impact of a Grand Slam-winning inspiration on a tennis nation’s fortunes is subject to lag, as players inspired by a hero champion take several years to emerge as prospects, let alone professional talents. The post-Barty hangover arrived more quickly than expected; the Barty effect on Australian tennis was always going to take longer to get going.
“Ash was looking at Sam (Stosur) and going, ‘Why not?’,” Stubbs says. Jolley and Kilderry, who stress that something similar has happened on the men’s side over the last couple of years in the wake of Kyrgios’ and De Minaur’s success, are expectant that success for one of the new crop will breed success for the rest.
Fans at Melbourne Park described to The Athletic how Barty is a role model and an inspiration to pick up a racket, while Gadecki and Jones have spoken about how inspirational she is. Jones has practised with her a few times.
Of the youngsters emerging, Jones and Joint are generating the most excitement. Jones, who reached the Australian Open and Wimbledon girls singles finals last year, is just 5ft 3in (160cm) but the ball pings off her strings. “She’s a tiny little thing but she hits the heck out of the ball,” Tracy Austin, who won her first U.S. Open when she was Jones’ age (16), said in a phone interview this week.
“She’s gutsy as hell,” adds Stubbs, who compares her to Russia’s 17-year-old world No. 15 Mirra Andreeva.
Joint is the next-highest-ranked teenager on the WTA Tour after Andreeva. Born in Michigan to an Australian father and German mother, Joint only relocated to Australia a couple of years ago and joined the national academy in Brisbane. She plays with Jones regularly and they credit each other for raising their level.
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“The next generation is popping through,” De Minaur said of his female compatriots in a news conference last week.
“Aussie tennis is in an exciting chapter because there’s a lot of young ones coming through,” said Tomljanovic after she had beaten Ashlyn Krueger to reach the second round on Tuesday.
Kilderry is bullish about his nation’s chances.
“If we’re sitting in here in a year, we’ll have a lot more players in the top 100,” he says. “And I’m really excited about the next generation coming through.”
There have been plenty of false dawns for big tennis nations like Australia over the last few years, so it’s impossible to know where this generation of players will end up. This once-dominant nation, now a sleeping giant, will have to wait a little while longer before it can wake up.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
