Taylor Townsend

Taylor Townsend is a Chicago left-hander and one of the last committed serve-and-volleyers on a power-baseline tour — a craft she's spent a career trying to bend the modern game around. She won the junior singles and doubles titles at the 2012 Australian Open and became the first American to hold the year-end No. 1 junior world ranking since Gretchen Rush in 1982, then turned professional at the end of that season. When the USTA declined to fund her 2012 US Open expenses, her coach Kamau Murray and XS Tennis fundraised the trip; she later split training between Murray in Chicago and Zina Garrison near Washington, D.C.

The game is a tactical outlier: slice, spin variety, soft hands and constant forward pressure. Townsend models her game on her idol, Martina Navratilova — the throwback comparison writes itself. The doubles results are where that skill set has fully cashed in. She reached the doubles No. 1 ranking after winning the 2025 Australian Open and reaching the Wimbledon semifinals in July 2025, the peak of a doubles résumé built largely alongside Katerina Siniakova.

Singles traction has been harder to hold. Her career-high singles ranking is No. 46, reached on August 19, 2024, and her signature singles run came at the 2025 US Open: ranked 139th, she ousted former Roland Garros champion Jelena Ostapenko — in a match that went viral for its fiery ending — and stunned No. 5 seed Mirra Andreeva before Barbora Krejcikova saved seven match points to deny her a first Slam quarterfinal, 1-6, 7-6(13), 6-3.

That run is the throughline of her current beat. Now ranked 83 in singles, Townsend is back inside the top 100 and chasing the Top-20 ceiling she's openly named, with her doubles dominance — including 2026 titles at Roland-Garros, Indian Wells and Miami — bankrolling the singles rebuild.