Ashleigh Barty
Ashleigh Jacinta Barty is an Australian former professional tennis player and cricketer. She was ranked as the world No. 1 in women's singles by the Women's Tennis Association for 121 weeks, and was ranked world No. 5 in doubles. Barty won 12 WTA Tour-level singles titles, and three majors at the 2019 French Open, 2021 Wimbledon Championships, and 2022 Australian Open, as well as the 2019 WTA Finals. She also won 12 doubles titles, including a major at the 2018 US Open with CoCo Vandeweghe.
A successful junior, Barty was the junior world No. 2 and won the 2011 Wimbledon girls' singles title. As a teenager, Barty had early success in doubles on the WTA Tour in 2013, finishing runner-up at three major doubles events with Casey Dellacqua. Late in the 2014 season, Barty decided to take an indefinite break from tennis, playing cricket instead. She signed with the Brisbane Heat for the inaugural Women's Big Bash League season despite having no formal training in the sport.
Barty returned to tennis in 2016. She had a breakthrough year in singles in 2017, winning her first WTA Tour title at the Malaysian Open and rising to No. 17 in the world. She also had another prolific year in doubles with Dellacqua, culminating in her first appearance at the WTA Finals in doubles. Barty then won her first Premier Mandatory and major tournament titles in doubles in 2018 before accomplishing the same feat in singles in 2019, highlighted by her victory at the 2019 French Open. Barty won five more titles in 2021, including a second major singles title at the Wimbledon Championships and two WTA 1000 titles. With her title at the 2022 Australian Open on home soil, she won a major in singles on all three surfaces. Barty also led Australia to a runner-up finish at the 2019 Fed Cup and won a bronze medal in mixed doubles at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Barty announced her retirement from tennis in March 2022, just two months after her Australian Open title and while ranked as the world No. 1 in singles.
Barty was an all-court player with a wide variety of shots. Despite her short stature for a professional tennis player, she was an excellent server, regularly ranking among the WTA Tour's leaders in aces and percentage of service points won. She serves as the National Indigenous Tennis Ambassador for Tennis Australia. Her 114 consecutive weeks at No. 1 is the fourth-longest streak in WTA history.
Early life and background
Ashleigh Jacinta Barty, known as "Ash", was born on 24 April 1996 in Ipswich, Queensland to Josie and Robert Barty. Her father grew up in the rural North Queensland town of Bowen where he became a Queensland and Australian representative in golf and later worked for the State Library of Queensland. Her mother is the daughter of English immigrants, was a state representative for Queensland in golf in her younger years, and began working as a radiographer after retiring from golf. Through her great-grandmother, Barty is of the Indigenous Australian Ngaragu people, the Aboriginal people of southern New South Wales and northeastern Victoria. She grew up in Springfield, a suburb of Ipswich, Queensland, and attended Woodcrest State College throughout her upbringing. She has two older sisters named Sara and Ali. Besides tennis, Barty also played netball as a child, but decided to focus on tennis because she "thought netball was a girls' game" and because her sisters were better than her at that sport.Barty started working with her longtime junior coach Jim Joyce at the West Brisbane Tennis Centre at the age of four. Joyce remarked that he did not typically train children as young as Barty, but made an exception because of her excellent hand-eye coordination and high level of focus. He recalled a moment from their first lesson, saying, "The first ball I threw to her, bang! She hit it right back." As a child, Barty also practised at home, remembering, "I used to hit the ball against every day after school, for hours on end." By the time she was nine, she was practising against boys who were six years older. At the age of 12, she was playing against male adults. She first met her mentor, Alicia Molik, at the under-12 national championships in Melbourne.
Former tennis professional Scott Draper later joined Barty's coaching team and worked with her at the National Academy. When she was 15 years old, former top 20 player Jason Stoltenberg took over as her primary coach. Barty's junior schedule took her to Europe and away from her family in Australia for much of the year. The season she turned 17, she was only home for 27 days during the entire calendar year.
Career
Juniors
Barty reached a career-high junior ranking of world No. 2, having excelled at both singles and doubles. She started playing low-level events on the ITF Junior Circuit in 2009 at the age of 13 and won her first title at the Grade-4 Australian International before turning 14. Barty continued to play only in tournaments below the higher tiers until the end of 2010, compiling a record of 24–2 in her five events that season while also capturing a Grade 2 title in Thailand. She played her first junior Grand Slam event in 2011 at the Australian Open, where she lost her opening match to third seed Lauren Davis. However, she bounced back from this defeat in the coming months by winning both the singles and doubles events at two high-level Grade 1 events, the Sarawak Chief Minister's Cup in Malaysia in March and the Belgian International Junior Championships in May.After a second-round loss at the 2011 French Open, Barty won her only junior Grand Slam title at Wimbledon at the age of 15. She became just the second Australian to win the girls' singles event after Debbie Freeman in 1980, and the first Australian girl to win any junior Grand Slam singles title since Jelena Dokic at the 1998 US Open. Compatriot Luke Saville also won the boys' title to help Australia sweep both singles events. The only set she dropped in the tournament was to Madison Keys in the third round, and her victory in the final was against third seed Irina Khromacheva. In the last major of the year Barty produced another strong singles result, losing to top seed Caroline Garcia in the semifinals of the US Open. Barty also won two more Grade-1 titles in doubles that season, one at Roehampton the week before Wimbledon and the other at the Canadian Open the week before the US Open. She concluded the season by winning the Junior Fed Cup for Australia with teammate Belinda Woolcock. Barty only played in one junior tournament the following year, where she finished runner-up in both singles and doubles at the Torneo International in Italy.
2010–2012: Australian Open debut, top 200
Barty started her professional career in April 2010 just after turning 14 at an ITF Women's Circuit $25K event in her hometown of Ipswich. She lost her first match to Karolina Wlodarczak. Barty played in one more main draw that year in Mount Gambier, where she reached the semifinals in just her second professional tournament. Her first pro match win came against Ayu Fani Damayanti. In 2011, she entered three more $25K events in Australia, with her best results being two quarterfinals. Following her girls' singles title at Wimbledon, Tennis Australia awarded Barty a wildcard into qualifying at the US Open. In her first WTA Tour-level appearance, she was unable to qualify for the main draw, losing her opening round match to Julia Glushko. Barty closed out the year by competing in a playoff for one of the Australian wildcard berths into the main draw of the 2012 Australian Open. Despite being the youngest player in the competition, she won all five of her matches without dropping a set to earn the wildcard. She swept her round-robin group featuring world No. 133 Casey Dellacqua before defeating No. 239 Arina Rodionova and No. 167 Olivia Rogowska in the knockout stage.Barty made her singles and doubles main-draw debuts on the WTA Tour in early 2012. Her doubles debut came at the Brisbane International, the first event of the year. After losing in singles qualifying, she partnered with Dellacqua to make the semifinals in doubles while still just 15 years old. Their tournament was highlighted by an upset of the top seeded team of Natalie Grandin and Vladimíra Uhlířová, both of whom were in the top 25 of the WTA doubles rankings. The following week, Barty made her singles debut as a wildcard at the Hobart International, losing her opening round match to Bethanie Mattek-Sands. She then made her Grand Slam main-draw debut the very next week at the Australian Open, where she lost her first round match to Anna Tatishvili. Later in the year, Barty also received wildcards into the main draws of the French Open and Wimbledon, but lost her opening-round matches to Petra Kvitová and Roberta Vinci, respectively, both of whom were seeded.
Besides her first WTA Tour appearances, Barty also had a break-out year on the ITF Circuit. She compiled a singles record of 34–4 in nine tournaments to accompany a doubles record of 25–5 while frequently partnering with compatriot Sally Peers. She won four ITF titles in both singles and doubles. In particular, her first two singles titles came in back-to-back weeks in February in Sydney and Mildura. She also won both the singles and doubles events at the Nottingham Challenge, a mid-level $50K grass-court event in the lead-up to Wimbledon. Barty ended the season with a doubles title at the $75K event on carpet in Japan, where she partnered with Dellacqua for the second time for her biggest title of the year. Her quarterfinal appearance in singles at the same tournament helped her rise to No. 177 in the WTA singles rankings, having first cracked the top 200 of the WTA singles rankings a few weeks earlier at the age of 16. She also finished the year ranked No. 129 in doubles.