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2023 in Review: Gauff's NYC coronation leads the year's women's highlights

Victoria Chiesa | December 14, 2023

As 2023 comes to a close, USTA.com is recapping the biggest stories of the year in American tennis. We continue our year in review with a look at five of the top women's storylines at the professional level.

 

Coco Gauff's long-awaited coronation at the US Open was the cherry on top of another strong year for American women's tennis.

 

Read on for the year's biggest highlights, which not only featured Gauff's first major victory, but also saw Jessica Pegula and Madison Keys remain amongst the game's elite, and young players like Emma Navarro and Peyton Stearns establish themselves on tour. 

Gauff's year turns around with sizzling summer

For the first half of 2023, Coco Gauff struggled. In the year's first six months, she'd reached just one final (which she won, at the WTA 250 in Auckland, New Zealand in the season's first week), and had only won back-to-back matches in two of the eight events she played from Miami in late March through Wimbledon, where she was beaten in the first round by fellow American Sofia Kenin.

 

Reflecting on the loss a month later in Cincinnati, Gauff said: “I could either let this crush me, or I can rise from it. I rose from it."

 

You know the rest: Gauff stormed through the summer, posting an 18-1 overall record in the hard-court swing, with titles in Washington, D.C. and Cincinnati before storming to her first major in Queens, where she became the youngest American woman to win the US Open since Serena Williams in 1999. (Her only loss came to eventual champion Jessica Pegula in the quarterfinals in Montreal, and in Cinncinnati, she beat world No. 1 Iga Swiatek for the first time in eight tries.)

Photo by Garrett Ellwood/USTA.

Gauff won four more matches in Beijing after the US Open before seeing her winning streak snapped by Swiatek in the semifinals, but her 16-match winning streak was the longest by a WTA player this year. She qualified for the year-end WTA Finals, too, in both singles and doubles for the second year in a row, and ended the season as the top-ranked American at world No. 3.

 

Pegula backs up breakthrough as beacon of consistency

If Jessica Pegula arrived in 2022, she showed staying power in 2023. She and Gauff were not only inside the singles Top 10 for the entirety of the year, but the they made up the first all-American pair to rank No. 1 in doubles since Liezel Huber and Lisa Raymond more than 10 years ago.

Photo by Garrett Ellwood/USTA.

Individually, Pegula helped the U.S. win the United Cup alongside Keys (who later beat her in the US Open to reach the semifinals) Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe, where she notably scored her first win over world No. 1 Iga Swiatek in the U.S.'s semifinal win over Poland.

 

Her other highlights included quarterfinals at the Australian Open and Wimbledon; her third and fourth career WTA singles titles, including her second WTA 1000 with a victory in Canada; two more WTA singles finals in Doha and Tokyo; and a mixed doubles final at the US Open with Austin Krajicek.

 

To cap the year, Pegula became the first American in five years to reach the final at the year-end WTA Finals, where she finished runner-up to Swiatek. To get there, she went a perfect 3-0 in the round-robin, reversing the 0-3 finish she posted last year in her debut, and also beat Gauff in the semifinals. 

Mathewson sweeps Parapan gold medals

Dana Mathewson has long been the torch-bearer for U.S. women in wheelchair tennis, but in 2023, Mathewson earned another title: flag-bearer. The highight of the 32-year-old's season was a trip to Santiago, Chile, where she not only led the U.S. wheelchair tennis delegation who competed at the Parapan American Games, but the entire contingent of U.S. athletes at the Games as one of two flagbearers at the opening ceremony.

 

Mathewson went on to sweep the singles and doubles gold medals at the event, doubling her career total of Parapan medals to four. In doubles, she teamed with the then-16-year-old Maylee Phelps (she turned 17 earlier this month) to win gold, earning the latter a trip to the top of the podium in her debut at the Parapan Games.  

A-plus: Former NCAA stars Navarro, Stearns break out

In a year that saw the USTA National Campus host a historic, combined NCAA men's and women's championships—an event which showcased all three NCAA divisions competing for a total of 14 championships at a single site for the first time—two former NCAA stars shined. Emma Navarro and Peyton Stearns, the 2021 and 2022 NCAA Division I singles champions, respectively, both made marked improvements in 2023. 

 

Navarro shaved more than 100 places off of her ranking in 2023, soaring to a career-high No. 32 in the year-end list, and currently, would be slotted as the last seeded player in the women's draw if the tournament began today. She won five USTA Pro Circuit titles in 2023, reached the quarterfinals or better at four WTA tour-level events, while also reaching her first WTA 125 final in Bastad, Sweden; and scored her first Top 10 win over Maria Sakkari in the fall in San Diego, where she reached the semifinals. 

Navarro & Stearns were an NYC doubles team. Photo by Pete Staples/USTA.

Stearns, meanwhile, ended the year inside the Top 50 after starting it outside of the Top 200. The former University of Texas star's first full year as a pro included a third-round showing at Roland Garros, where she beat former champion Jelena Ostapenko; a fourth-round showing at the US Open, where she pushed Wimbledon winner Marketa Vondrousova to three sets; a runner-up finish in Bogota, her first WTA final; and her first nomination to the U.S. Billie Jean King Cup team for the Finals in November.

 

Perhaps a result from one of the first weeks of the year was a sign of what was to come: On Jan. 15, Navarro, then ranked No. 149, beat Stearns, ranked No. 209, to win the first of those five USTA Pro Circuit titles at a W25 event in Naples, Fla. 

 

Sofia Kenin says she's back

While Gauff's summer surge kickstarted after a loss to Kenin at the All England Club, the 2020 Australian Open champion's resurgent season also merits mention on its own. Ranked as low as No. 280 in January, the former world No. 4 used a strong second half to propel herself back into the Top 30, and ended the year at No. 33.

 

Kenin's comeback season began with her first Top 20 win in nearly three years in February, when she beat No. 15 Veronika Kudermetova in Doha. A third-round showing in Miami a month later put her back into the Top 150. But her season truly ramped up in the spring, where she beat then-No. 2 Aryna Sabalenka in the second round in Rome, her best win by ranking since she beat then-No. 1 Ashleigh Barty en route to her Australian Open win. 

 

Kenin's Wimbledon run ended in the third round at the hands of eventual semifinalist, and a woman on a comeback of her own, in Elina Svitolina, but she wasn't done scoring notable victories. In September, she reached her first WTA singles final since 2020 in San Diego, which inched her close to a return to the Top 50, and a month later, she reached her first WTA 1000 semifinal in four years in Guadalajara, where she beat Ostapenko and 2021 US Open finalist Leylah Fernandez. 

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