Longtime WTA umpire Anja Vreg on officiating journey from playing: 'When I came back, I didn't have the same results that I wanted'

Anja Vreg is a longtime WTA umpire and in a feature length interview with the organisation after making a transition to behind the scenes and she described her journey to the top of officiating.

Vreg was a promising player as a junior who was primed for a career in the sport on that side but a back injury derailed this.

Instead of giving up though, she went to officiating school and she detailed her journey from doing smaller tournaments to the Australian Open.

"When I came back, I didn’t have the same results that I wanted, so my motivation dropped, and I said to my parents, ‘I don’t think this is something for me,’ and that I wanted to quit," she said.

"I was going to school like everybody else, and my mom said, ‘Oh, there’s an officiating school in our town — you should go. You never know where it could go.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to go. Who wants to be an umpire?’ You get yelled at, and all those things — I’m not interested.’

Beginning of something special for the Slovenian

"She said, ‘You should go, you should try it,’ so I went. I was 15 at that time, but since I wasn’t interested in any officiating, I had my badge but I wasn’t really umpiring. Then, when I was maybe 17, 18, I started to do more, and I thought that maybe I could just earn some extra money, do some traveling…to see the world while doing tennis."

"At an ATP Challenger [in Rijeka, Croatia], I was talking to someone who was a very good friend of mine, and he said, ‘Oh, you’re doing many more tournaments, and you’re officiating more and more — what would be your interest, your goal? Where would you want to go — which Grand Slam?’," Vreg recalled of her early officiating years, which took her to countries abroad including Austria, Qatar and Switzerland.

"And I was like, ‘Come on, I’m not going to do any Grand Slam — I’m far behind that — but if I could choose one, it would be the Australian Open. The next morning, I woke up, and I was selected for the next Australian Open.

"I applied thinking I don’t have a chance — at that time, I was already a white badge, doing quite a lot of lines at tournaments around the area, and I applied, but I said, ‘I don’t have a chance. I come from small Slovenia, you know, nobody knows me.’

"I just couldn’t believe that the day before, I spoke to somebody and I said that was my wish but it would never come true, and then I woke up to an email... from there, I was getting more and more into it, and it started to be one week after another. I had enough matches, and I decided that I was going to apply for this [ITF bronze badge] school in Turkey.

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