Taylah Preston

The junior résumé arrived long before the ranking did. Born in Joondalup, Western Australia, in October 2005 and on court in Perth from the age of four, Preston took the Australian Tennis Awards' Female Junior Athlete prize in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the second player since Ash Barty to win it three years running, then made her Grand Slam main-draw debut at the Australian Open in 2024, where Elina Svitolina held her to four games.

A 5-foot-7 right-hander with a two-handed backhand, she hits flat and forward, and the forehand does the damage: 15 of her 26 winners came off that wing in her first Grand Slam match win. The serve is not the engine, with a 2.7 percent ace rate and holds in only 57 percent of service games in 2026 against 47.6 percent of return points won, so she has to break to stay in matches.

The tour-level breakthrough took two runs at it. 2024 brought a first WTA main-draw win, over then-No. 42 Magdalena Frech at San Diego, plus a first WTA 125 final at Puerto Vallarta, while 2025 disappeared into qualifying draws and ITF weeks. January 2026 changed the shape of it: a wild card ranked outside the top 200 at the Hobart International, she beat Jessica Bouzas Maneiro and Rebecca Sramkova before out-hitting top seed Emma Raducanu 6-2, 6-4 for a maiden tour semifinal, losing it to Iva Jovic. A week later she won her first Slam match, over Shuai Zhang in Melbourne, before Linda Noskova stopped her.

As of Aug. 28, 2026, the 20-year-old sits at WTA No. 100, a career high first reached three days earlier and 146 places above where she stood a year ago, with a maiden WTA 125 title at Vancouver in August doing the lifting. The tour-level title column still reads zero: the top 100 came first.