Volynets Tour Portrait

[jimlosaltos]

Changing gears from our Tour Portraits of recent number one men, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, here's a young WTA player that has built her rankings the hard way. { Please click to see Tour Portrait of Katie Volynets }

I took these photos of Katie Volynets from Walnut Creek, Ca at a WTA 125 at Stanford. Since then, she upset Mirra Andreeva and Ons Jabeur at IW, has made the main draw at every major, winning her first round at Wimbledon this year, then taking the eventual champ Barbora Krejcikova to a pair of tough tiebreaks. 22 yo ranked 57 has won $1.56 Million.

She's fun to photograph since Katie must be one of the most gymnastic players on tour. I think some teaching pro must have told her to build her quads and jump into every shot.

I took all these photos at the Golden Gate Open a merged WTA 125 and ATP Challenger at Stanford this summer.

Here are two examples. I'll post the second large image tomorrow. A pot is boiling.

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[jimlosaltos]

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And here's Katie full airborne <g>

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[jimlosaltos]

WTA has a list of all the players that won from match point(s) down this year at this link.

Katie comes in at number 20 with this: Katie Volynets saved two match points at 6-4 down in the third-set tiebreak before beating Arantxa Rus 6-2, 6-7(6), 7-6(6) in the Charleston first round -- which became the longest match of 2024 at 3 hours and 43 minutes.

But she's also on the losers end of another: Sofia Kenin overturned a 5-3 third-set deficit, saving one match point trailing 5-4 on serve, to defeat Katie Volynets 6-2, 2-6, 7-5 in the Cleveland first round.