Sonay Kartal is a Sidcup-born, Brighton-raised right-hander who took the slow road to the tour. She began playing at age six after watching her older brother, and still trains at the Pavilion & Avenue tennis club in Hove. A quirk in her origin: Kartal writes left-handed and began playing tennis as a lefty before switching to right-handed after a year and a half. She is of Turkish descent through her father and turned pro in 2019, grinding through the ITF tiers — she has won 14 ITF titles, all in singles — before the tour caught up to her.
The game is built on flat, low groundstrokes and grass instincts rather than raw firepower: a compact two-handed backhand, clean footwork, and the patience of a player who learned to win matches one rally at a time. It's a counterpunching profile that rewards the surfaces that keep the ball low, which is why her best results cluster on grass and quick hardcourts.
The 2024–25 breakthrough rewired her ceiling. In 2024 she won her first WTA title at Monastir and reached the third round at Wimbledon as a qualifier; her ranking entered the top 100 and peaked at No. 85 by year-end. Then came the leap: at Wimbledon she beat 20th seed Jelena Ostapenko, Viktoriya Tomova and Diane Parry to reach a major fourth round for the first time, lifting her to a career-high No. 44 on 14 July 2025. The signature scalp came in Asia — she beat then-world No. 5 Mirra Andreeva 7-5, 2-6, 7-5 to reach her first WTA 1000 quarterfinal in Beijing, her first top-10 win. The body of work earned her 2025 LTA female player of the year.
This season she's again a fixture in the second week of the big events: at Indian Wells she beat Lanlana Tararudee, 20th seed Emma Navarro and 15th seed Madison Keys before falling to world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in the fourth round. Currently ranked No. 72 and the British No. 2, she's chasing her July-2025 high again — and grass, when it arrives, remains her best shot at doing it.