A little less than a year ago, Alexandra Eala was an unproven teenager from the Philippines hunting for her breakthrough in professional tennis.

As she sat in the catacombs of Hard Rock Stadium, after her first significant wins at the sport’s top level, the world No. 140 tried to absorb what she had achieved at the 2025 Miami Open, while also trying not to make too much of it.

Eala, who entered the tournament with a wild card, had started the tournament with two wins over Grand Slam champions. After knocking off Jelena Ostapenko in the second round and Madison Keys in the third, an injured Paula Badosa could not play their fourth-round match.

In the quarterfinals, Eala met Iga Świątek, another Grand Slam champion and one of the two dominant powers in women’s tennis the past few years. A couple of years earlier, Świątek had attended Eala’s graduation from the Rafael Nadal Academy. Eala was happy just to get a photo.

Then she beat Świątek, too. Eala was into the semifinals.

“Crazy,” Eala said during an interview then, before very quickly switching from wide-eyed newcomer into competitor mode. Regardless of what happened in her next matches, she assumed her life was going to be just as it always had been.

“When things are this new and this big I can’t afford to think about it. I don’t think it should change so drastically so fast, because at the end of the day I am the same person,” she said.

After a year that has felt long and short all at once, she is and she is not.

Eala is the world No. 29. She is a sporting avatar for the Philippines, an archipelago of 7,641 islands and over 115 million people. She embodies the potential and the pressure on players who represent nations outside of tennis’ historical centers of power — the players whose fandom and significance can quickly outstrip their ranking and status on the court.

These are things Eala has long envisioned, because for much of the past decade, she has been breaking new ground for her country in the sport. Making history, for her, is the easy part.

“Those thoughts are almost inevitable, because growing up I was really only the the only Filipina in the international tournaments that I was exposed to,” the 20-year-old said during an interview Tuesday from Miami.

“It’s hard to imagine at that young age that you can have such an impact on the whole country. It’s been a step-by-step realization in terms of the impact that it’s had.”

And what an impact it has been. Eala might not yet have the status of Manny Pacquiao, the former boxing world champion, but give her just a little more time, Filipinos who are in a position to gauge her ascendance say. Just as Pacquiao was, Eala has become a kind of people’s champion.

People who never followed tennis before plan their days around her matches, which is no easy feat when so many of them take place in the middle of the Filipino night, because of the time difference between Manila and a tennis tour that spends so much time in Europe and North America.

“She is already being treated like a multiple Grand Slam winner,” Dyan Castillejo said during an interview. Castillejo, a sports broadcaster in the Philippines who, four decades ago, was the closest thing Filipino tennis had to Eala.

She never cracked the top 400, has been following Eala since she was in elementary school, tracking her rise from junior champion, to the Rafael Nadal Academy, to the WTA Tour’s top tournaments. Castillejo did a feature on Eala when she was 12, after she won Les Petits As, the premier tournament for players 14-and-under. She’s a bit like the country music buff who knew Taylor Swift when she was playing local fairs in rural Pennsylvania.

Eala had some cut-through then, but it’s nothing like today.

“Every move. Every video. Every win. Every loss. Every word she says people are like, ‘Are you following it?’” Castillejo said. For years, she added, almost no one in her country followed tennis and barely anyone played. Now it seems like everyone with access to a tennis court is trying to play. Suddenly, it’s really hard to get one.

Eala’s fans love the way she never quits, the way she pumps her fist after she whistles one of her sharply angled, lefty forehands across the court. She speaks English and Spanish, but often talks to the crowd in her native Tagalog. Since her Miami Open run, she has reached a first WTA Tour final, become the first Filipino player to win a main-draw Grand Slam match in the Open Era, and drawn thousands of fans to tournaments around the globe, who pack out field courts and try to scream their hero toward victory.

The grind of that first year on the tour has taken its toll. Every week, some part of her body hurts in a way it hadn’t before. Her serve, which she is trying to add heft to, has taken some swattings during some tough losses.

But then she goes to another tournament, and the Filipino diaspora packs the stands and screams for her and everything becomes magical again.

There was the madness of her wild first-round upset of Denmark’s Clara Tauson at the U.S. Open, when she prevailed 13-11 in the final-set tiebreak, thousands of fans stuffed into the Grandstand waving flags. They were there well past midnight for Eala’s opening round win over Dayana Yastremska of Ukraine at Indian Wells two weeks ago. Eala ate it up, coming back from 5-4 down with Yastremska serving for the match to win 7-5 in the third set.

“It means the world to have this community behind me in such a prestigious tournament,” she said in a news conference after her win. “For them to make the effort to stay up late and stay in the cold and cheer me on, so it really added to the feelings and the emotions after the match.”

Castillejo was there courtside, tapping out updates for fans following on social media, raising her phone to capture Eala’s surge, which was fueled by the support but also careful with it.

Eala knows that focusing on how many people are watching her won’t help. Instead, she is able to draw confidence from their passion, if she can process it the right way.

“What’s different about tennis to other team sports is that there’s only two people, so you really know that their attention is on you, but it’s a skill to be able to tune those things out,” she said.

“When you’re in the zone and you’re competing the competitive urge just takes over. There’s a lot of people watching, but you’re doing what you do, what you know how to do.”

Eala only got a taste of her impact at home during the off-season, when she returned home for just a couple of days. She won the gold medal at the Southeast Asian Games in Thailand in December, a capstone on a magical rookie year on the WTA Tour. Then, during the second week of this year’s Australian Open, she got a hero’s welcome as Manila hosted a WTA 125 event. The WTA had reached out to the country’s tennis federation, urging them to host an event. They built a stadium in roughly a month. Every match sold out.

“Everyone is still on a high,” Castillejo said.

That includes Eala. She lost in the quarterfinals, at an event one rung below the main tour, but she said the Manila event remains the highlight of her year.

“Having the tournament at home was such a big thing for me just because it’s such a milestone for women’s tennis in the Philippines and tennis in Philippines in general,” she said.

She knows what lies ahead. For the first time, she has to defend a significant chunk of rankings points she won on that run to the Miami semis last year. After embracing the freedom that comes with such a rocket-fuel run — the ability to enter Grand Slams and more WTA 1000s without having to either qualify, or weigh performance against rankings points accrued in the previous year — she faces the stranger challenge that all players must reckon with.

Each season, tennis players compete against their rivals. They also compete against last year’s version of themselves. This year’s Eala plays Laura Siegemund, the master of the sport’s dark arts, in her opening match. Should she win, a second Miami meeting with Świątek could be on.

“I’ve been defending points for as long as I’ve been competing,” Eala said. “Whether I lose first round or whether I win the whole thing, it’s OK. If I don’t get them now, I’ll get them in another tournament.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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