Brief bio

Serena Williams is one of the top female tennis players in the world and earned her first Major Singles title at the U.S Open in 1999. In recent years she has been the undisputed force in woman’s tennis and has won 21 Grand Slam singles, several Olympic gold medals and reached the finals of the mixed team events as the world’s number one in women’s singles and is currently ranked as the world’s number one by the Women’s Tennis Association.

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Early playing history

Born in Saginaw, Michigan as the youngest of five daughters, while still young the family move to Compton, California. In California, Williams started playing tennis when she was only three years old, where her father home-schooled Serena and her sister Venus. Her official coaches was her mother and father, plus other mentors and a number of official coaches helped her to learn the game, including Richard Williams.

Williams qualified for her first professional event in 1995 at the Bell Challenge, when she was just 14 years old; where she lost in the first round to Anne Miller. While ranked number 304 in the world, she defeated the both world number 7 Mary Pierce and Monica Seles who was ranked number 4 at the time. In the recording of her first career wins she became the lowest ranked player in the Open Era to defeat two of the top ranked opponents in a single tournament, which moved her up to the 99th ranked position.
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Brief bio

Maria Sharapova is ranked as the world’s number 4 female professional tennis player, and is from Bradenton in Florida, although born in Russia SFSR, and Soviet Union. She turned pro in April 2001, has been ranked world number one in singles by the WTA for a total of 21 weeks on five different occasions. She is the only Russian and one of ten women to achieve a career Grand Slam and earned a silver Olympic medalist in women singles, which she received at the Summer Olympics held in London in 2012.

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Early playing history

Maria Sharapova was born in Nyagan, in the Russian SFSR during 1987, her parents both from Gomel, Belarusian SSR, left their homeland concerned about the effects of the Chernobyl 1986 nuclear power plant disaster before she was born.

Aged 2 her family moved to Sochi, in the Krasnodar Krai region of Russia in 1989 and her father became friends with Aleksandr Kafelnikov, his son Yevgeny won two Grand Slam singles crowns and became the first Russian number one ranked male tennis player. Sharapova got her first racquet from Aleksandr when she was 4 years old in 1991 and she began practicing with her dad at the local park. Her starting tennis lessons were with Yuri Yutkin the well-known Russian Coach, he was immediately impressed with her extraordinary hand-eye coordination.
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Brief bio

The Kosice, Slovakian born Martina Hingis celebrated her first birthday on the 30 September 1981. Beginning her tennis career a very young age she realised her some of dreams as a child early on in her career, by becoming the youngest ever Grand Slam female champion in the history of the game. She showed her future brilliance with a doubles win at Wimbledon aged only 15. Her long list of hard earned achievements and friendly demeanour made her a firm spectator favourite at the Tennis Australian Open ever since her first appearance, and by the late 1990s was already the top-ranked female tennis player in the world. Due to an unfortunate series of injuries she was forced to retire in 2003, and in 2014 she again went into retirement after allegations accusing her of drug abuse, in 2013 she once again made a successful return to tennis with her brilliant doubles play.

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Early playing history

Martina’s professional tennis debut occurred just after her 14th birthday and by age 15 years and nine months she and Helena Sukova paired up and took home top honours by winning the 1996 women’s Wimbledon doubles crown, this achievement earned her the title as the youngest ever women’s Grand Slam doubles champion. In her first year thereafter she also had the distinction of becoming the youngest women’s Grand Slam singles titleholder in the 20th century, after achieving her Tennis Australian Open victory, which earned her a double crown as the youngest ever woman to be ranked world number one, in the process she edged out Steffi Graf that suffered from injury.

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