Flushing Meadows, NY – French wildcards broke into the semifinals of her family's Grand Slam, a year of severe knee injury that caused her to start a week before the French Open.
The Canadian Wildcard rolled her home WTA 1000 on his debut, defeating four Grand Slam titles, thus completing her rise from the 300s to the top 30 women's tennis rankings.
The rise of Loïs Boisson and Victoria Mboko, with all the hallmarks of tennis fairy tales, suddenly pushed the story that constituted Cinderella, one of the most enduring prototypes in sports. There is only one question: This is not a true story. The real story is far from the bright lights of four Grand Slams and the large stadium, with 1,000 floors of matches below them.
The ITF World Tennis Tour is the lowest level in professional tennis, twice below the WTA Tour. Its competition has few prizes on ranking points and is embellished around the world. For some players, this is their entire tennis presence. For others, it’s a place to develop a habit of victory that serves as a springboard for the upper echelons of the sport.
She was 14-4 in the 2025 ITF race before Boisson's Paris run. Belinda Bencic returned to the WTA tour in January after giving birth to his first child and rose from World 421 to World 19, where he started two ITF events.
Mboko and Boisson are not in the U.S. Open, but a winning machine looks like the rising body of a star. Janice Tjen, a 23-year-old from Indonesia, was until last year when he played college tennis at Pepperdine University north of Los Angeles, qualifying before defeating No. 24 seed Veronika Kudermetova in the first round. This was her first mainstream Grand Slam match, where she beat one of the 25 players in the world. The beginning of a fairy tale? Or is it the climax of 100 victories in 113 games of the ITF World Tennis Tour, including 20, 16 and 27 consecutive games, with 42 games in one game?
“My coach and I always talk about whether this is the first round, if it's ITF, if it's the final, then we're going to try to switch it to another game,” Tjen said in an interview on Sunday. “And I think that helps me deal with the nerves.”
“We use this sentence, 'The ball doesn't care.” The ball doesn't care who is still a tennis court with the same size. ”
On the other end of the second round will be Emma Raducanu, a fairy tale of professional tennis for the past 25 years. Raducanu became the first qualifier to win the Grand Slam in this competition four years ago and did not win the most unlikely title in her run. “She started college and graduated two weeks later,” said a British tennis executive.
Tjen's journey and Mboko and Boisson's journey, as well as Czech player Tereza Valentová, who plays 2022 Wimbledon Championship Elena Rybakina's journey is more like working on a smaller company and then applying that knowledge in a large company. Last May, Tjen was not ranked and won the lowest ITF event in Monastir, Tunisia to step on the ladder. There is no activity for professional women in Indonesia. She travels in Pepperdine and beyond to improve her rankings.
She ran into Bint by chance when she played several games in New Zealand late last year. Originally from England, he was the country's national tennis performance coach, where he coached Vivian Yang, Pepperdine alumnus and Tjen's friends.
Bint was driven by Tjen's willingness to play and learn and spent weeks on a trip with her, and held two events in South Korea in April and May. Tjen won one of them and won the finals in the other, and Bint firmly believes she has something special. He quit his job as tennis in New Zealand and began coaching full time.
What's special is largely from a heavy Topspin forehand that fits with aggressive backhand slices, the result of Tjen's growth as three-time Grand Slam champion Ash Barty. Fragments from Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz played a role in their training courses, Bint said.
Bint focused on improving her serve accuracy and helping Tjen rely on her abilities. She kicked a backhand shot against Kudermetova, set up by two punishing forehands. Brad Gilbert, former coaches of Andre Agassi and former coaches Andy Roddick and Coco Gauff, also a Pepperdine alumnus, is still close to their college setup, and he thinks she will be a tag team player and maybe even a Grand Slam champion in the subject.
In a telephone interview at the U.S. Open Open Open, Gilbert recalls the college ode that accompanied Pepperdine’s victory – “What time is now? It’s the JT era!” – in explaining the logic based on these accelerations. Win is winning, no matter the level of the opponent, you will win.
“You came here and won the victory and felt you could win at this level,” he said. A former world number one and tennis analyst at the U.S. Open said in an interview on Sunday:tAny level, this will be full of confidence when you compile this type of run. “He was talking about Mboko, but he could have talked about Boisson or Tjen.
Tjen cited the experience of constantly making the game one of the transferable benefits of her ITF Odyssey, and Mboko and Boisson reverberated in the tournament interview. They and Iva Jović, the 17-year-old American has a similarly enviable record in ITF and WTA 125 (the second run), adding that the depth of women’s tennis makes the WTA Tour’s jump not as obvious as it seems. “A lot of girls come from these girls and have good stuff right away on the WTA tour, so I think it's great, honestly. I love ITFS.”
IvaJović is one of many emerging stars, winning the championship in the lower tier of professional tennis. (Robert Prange / Getty Images)
“I think it's just the number of games. In these games, you have more games and you really have to grind because if you want to get here, you have to win at this level. You can't just win a round and then lose. You have to really clean up and win these tournaments. So, as long as you have to show up, you have to introduce you to every day, you have to show up and you have to show up.
Still, moving upwards requires some evolution. Bint has increased his team as Tjen improves his team and focuses more on nutrition and sleep, thus adding Pepperdine’s fitness coach. There are also physiology from Indonesia. Overall, the atmosphere remains the same: a lot of monopoly deals, often replacing UNO’s game choice for the locker room and Mario Kart. The fast green dinosaur Yoshi is Tjen's choice. Tjen's parents are huge tennis fans who will be back home in Jakarta. They like to go to New York to see their daughter, but Tjen's grandma has been uncomfortable, so they keep it.
For Tjen, the rise also means being comfortable in new situations, not just on the court. Having to speak after the game, Tjen had to direct it to her press conference after beating Kudermetova. As the first Indonesian player to win a Grand Slam since 2004, Angelique Widjaja received additional attention and pressure from representing a country that is less obvious on the tennis map when she won in New York. She met Alex Eala, 20, who has been creating tennis history in the Philippines for the past few months, both of them growing up.
Tjen, who was studying in Oregon for the first time, moved to Pepperdine in June 2021. A few months later, she was nursing an injury, which meant she had enough time to watch the U.S. Open that year. She said Raducanu's amazing game “not only inspired me, but we can do that, too.”
Even Rado Kanu's Cinderella story is not a script. The Covid-19 pandemic means she played only six games in 2020 and then suddenly entered the scene in 2021. But in 2018 and 2019, she played 50 games on the tour, teaching Tjen, Mboko and Boisson to win, win, and win more.
She won 40.
(Top Photos: Robert Planche/Getty Images)