Lucrezia Stefanini

Stefanini is a 28-year-old from Firenze who arrived on tour the long way, without a junior fast track behind her. Per her WTA profile she picked up a racquet at eight, made her tour main-draw debut in 2021 by qualifying in Abu Dhabi, and had banked ten ITF singles titles before a major main draw ever came her way.

The style is the first thing you notice. At 1.64 m she hits two-handed off both wings — the rarest configuration in the women's game — and nominates the down-the-line backhand as her favorite shot, which is also the shot her matches are built around. The serve grants her nothing, as evidenced by a 0.2 percent career ace rate, but the return travels: 46.4 percent of return points won against 52.9 percent of her own service games held across her stat-carrying matches. Every match becomes a return contest, which is how a player with no free points survives on hard courts.

The breakthrough came at 24. On debut at the 2023 Australian Open she beat 71st-ranked Tatjana Maria 3-6, 7-5, 6-4 for a first major main-draw win, and by 7 August 2023 she stood at No. 99, still her career high; that autumn she was part of Italy's runner-up squad at the Billie Jean King Cup. A first WTA 125 final followed at Rovereto in 2025.

As of September 2026, Stefanini sits WTA No. 119 — her season peak, up from 136 at the start of the year and 29 places better than twelve months earlier. The North American swing produced both her wins on a 2-5 season: Elisabetta Cocciaretto in Cincinnati, then Dayana Yastremska in three sets for a career-best US Open second round, where Jasmine Paolini ended it. No tour-level title yet, and 620 WTA points that all had to be earned from the front of a draw.