WTA Tour Finals offers tennis showcase for American women’s year of evolution
America’s top women’s tennis players have spent 2025 doing what they have done for a while: delivering when the lights shine brightest.
They won the first two Grand Slams, with Madison Keys taking the Australian Open and Coco Gauff the French. Amanda Anisimova reached the Wimbledon final, before she and Jessica Pegula made the U.S. Open semifinals. Anisimova made the final, too, meaning an American woman contested all four major finals of 2025.
The past two months have brought more of the same. Anisimova and Gauff won the two biggest trophies on offer — Anisimova at the China Open in Beijing and Gauff at the Wuhan Open, both WTA 1000 events. Pegula was Gauff’s opponent in the Wuhan final and reached the semifinals in Beijing; Anisimova beat Gauff to reach the final there.
That wrapped the most successful regular season for American women in nearly a quarter of a century. Keys, who has been rehabilitating an unspecified injury since the U.S. Open, joins Gauff, Anisimova and Pegula at the WTA Tour Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which begins Saturday and for which the best eight players of the year qualify.
“That’s crazy that half of us are Americans,” Anisimova said Friday during a news conference in Riyadh. “I’m just really proud of myself and the other girls. Hopefully we can keep going. Definitely makes us represent our country well.”
The last time four Americans played it was 2002, when Serena and Venus Williams, Jennifer Capriati, and Monica Seles lined up. Four qualified the next year as well, but because of injuries, only Capriati and Chanda Rubin played.
The U.S. has massive advantages in women’s tennis. It’s big, with a population of over 300 million; it’s wealthy, with a far higher gross domestic product per person than any other large country. It also holds a legally enshrined aspiration of promoting access to sports regardless of race or gender, thanks to Title IX, for which tennis legend Billie Jean King vociferously campaigned in the 1970s.
These four players have had plenty of tools for a long time — all spending much of their lives in the tennis hotbed of Florida, while representing different strata of the country’s routes into the sport — but this year, all four have found new ways to stay with or join its elite.
“All of us look different,” Gauff, 21, told reporters at the Cincinnati Open this summer. “We have biracial, Black, white, all types of representation for girls and guys to look up to in the top 10 or close to the top 10.”
Keys, 30, arrived in Melbourne with a new racket and a new determination to go for her shots in the biggest moments. Becoming that player began in 2023, when Bjorn Fratangelo, who was her fiancé then and is now her husband, began coaching her, but Keys added to that intensity by working with Reshard Langford, a former NFL defensive back who has become a USTA fitness guru. Working with a therapist to stop letting results define her also helped Keys win a Grand Slam title in the making for 16 years.
“It gives you a little bit more freedom when you’re playing, because now you’re looking for the next one,” she said ahead of the U.S. Open. “But you already know that you can do it and that you have done it.”
Friday, Keys said she had used her layoff since that tournament as a training block, focused on improving her game and getting healthy. She was busy.
“I switched strings,” she said. “I modified my serve a bit. I was working on coming to the net quite a lot. I’m saying that now so all of you can hold me accountable to actually come to the net during points in matches.”
After an up-and-down start to 2025, Gauff caught fire on the European clay, reaching two WTA 1000 finals before she won the French Open the way she so often wins, grinding out sets with speed, endurance and self-belief. Two months later, after a few disastrous serving performances, she fired her technical coach and began rebuilding the most important shot in tennis with biomechanics expert Gavin MacMillan, just days before the U.S. Open, which is her most important tournament of the year.
Gauff struggled through two memorable and miserable early-round matches under the lights on Arthur Ashe Stadium, then won one easily and lost the next handily. She called the process “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” The dividends still arrived quickly.
“I wanted to make sure if I were to lose, it would be losing the right way and the way I think I should play in the future,” she said after winning the Wuhan Open without dropping a set. She has hit 122 more double faults than the next-worst number on the WTA Tour in 2025, but still sits at No. 3 in the world.
The most notable change on her serve is that she is spinning and kicking it more, which makes it a little more reliable. The kick serve also can trouble players who aren’t as tall. In her news conference Friday, Gauff said that she and MacMillan have are battling a little bit of a healthy back-and-forth over her serve strategy.
“We’re kind of tug-of-war, because I prefer to hit flatter and harder serves,” she said. “I like to go for the ace.”
Ultimately, she knows variety can be her friend, and sees no reason why she can’t continue to evolve just as her compatriots have.
Mark Knowles, Pegula’s main coach, said during a recent interview that two tough losses catalyzed her fall run. Wild card Loïs Boisson stunned Pegula at the French Open, before she suffered a rare Grand Slam first-round defeat at Wimbledon, to Elisabetta Cocciaretto.
Pegula, 31, then allowed Knowles and co-coach Mark Merklein to focus on evolving her game to meet the moment of the U.S. Open, even if it meant a loss or two in the lead-up tournaments. Pegula has long been a great defender and hitter, but she embraced doing more. “She’s obviously one of the cleanest, if not the cleanest ballstriker on the women’s tour, but we’re also trying to transition forward,” Knowles said.
The tweaks carried her to the semifinals, where she nearly upset the eventual champion, world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka. Then she beat her in a thrilling semifinal at the Wuhan Open.
“This experience has reminded me that I’m adaptable and take on a lot of challenges and compete really well,” Pegula said after losing to Gauff in the final. “It gives me a lot of confidence in my match play, especially going into the WTA Finals.”
Pegula said Friday that at this point in her career, tactics rule the day.
“Your strokes are going to be the way that they are,” she said in her news conference. “You know how you’re going to play. It’s just more tactically, how can you be unpredictable and how are you adapting to [who the other] player is. What are their patterns that they like? Are they changing those patterns based on you, or are they changing them based on trying not to be predictable?”
Then there is Anisimova, who was outside the top 200 in the summer of 2024 as she came back from injuries and burnout. Today, she is one of the most consistently dangerous players in the sport. With the help of a new physiotherapist, Shadi Soleymani, Anisimova has completely revamped her diet and fitness routine. Always in possession of a lethal backhand and a dangerous forehand, the 24-year-old can now move well enough to beat Sabalenka at Wimbledon, Świątek at the U.S. Open, and Gauff in Beijing.
Świątek double-bageled her in the Wimbledon final, but she didn’t let that get her down, making the final of the next Grand Slam seven weeks later, before winning the China Open four weeks after that.
“I feel like I’ve learned a lot about myself,” Anisimova said in her news conference in Beijing. “Just figuring out ways to face certain challenges and push myself in moments when it feels like I can’t go any further. I feel like, in that sense, I learned that I’m stronger than I think.”
She and the other three in this quartet are making American women’s tennis as strong as it has ever been.
“It’s not riding on one person’s shoulders,” Pegula said. “We realize that that support has helped us. It’s definitely a fun group to be part of.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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