The Iva Jovic era is coming, if the WTA doesn’t break everyone first

Sunday, 20 September 2026 at 15:00

If watching Iva Jovic win tennis matches bothers you, this would be a terrific time to start following golf. Because she isn’t going anywhere.

Jovic beat Peyton Stearns 6-4, 6-2 Saturday night to win Guadalajara for the second consecutive year. She didn’t drop a set during the tournament. She didn’t face a break point in the final. And at 18 years old, she became the first player to successfully defend the Guadalajara singles title.

None of this was particularly surprising. We are watching the dawn of the Iva Jovic era. I’ve been writing about Jovic for a while now, and what continues to impress me isn’t simply that she wins. It’s how quickly things that once looked extraordinary for her begin looking normal.

Last year, Guadalajara was the breakthrough. This year, she came back as defending champion and acted like the place belonged to her.

That’s different. Young players arrive on Tour all the time. Young players have great weeks all the time. What separates the truly special ones is what happens after everybody knows who they are. The scouting gets better. The expectations get bigger. The opponents stop overlooking them.

Iva Jovic - the queen of Guadalajara again.

Then you have to do it again. Jovic just did. And this hasn’t exactly been a one-tournament season. She reached the Australian Open quarterfinals, made the second week at Wimbledon and the US Open and will rise to a career-high No. 13 when the new rankings come out Monday.

Jovic will play WTA Finals in bold prediction

So I’ll make the pretty easy prediction now. Iva Jovic will play in the 2027 WTA Finals. And I expect her to arrive there with at least one WTA 1000 or Grand Slam title already on her résumé.

Bookmark it. Mock me later if I’m wrong. But watching Jovic also brings us to the much less enjoyable part of women’s tennis right now. It’s who’s-still-standing season. We have reached the point on the WTA calendar where string and bubblegum appear to be holding a meaningful portion of the Tour together, physically and emotionally.

And I don’t blame the players one bit. I’ve argued this before and I’ll keep arguing it: the WTA Finals should be happening around now.

Not in November. Now. Finish the meaningful season in September. Play the Finals. Celebrate the eight best players in the world while they’re still recognizable as human beings rather than ambulatory collections of kinesiology tape.

Then send everybody home. For three months. Actual time off. Not “time off” in the bizarre professional-tennis definition where a player finishes her season, flies home, deals with sponsor obligations, gets treatment on whatever hurts, sees her family for several days and then realizes preseason training for Australia basically needs to begin.

For many players, the practical offseason isn’t three months. It isn’t even one month. It can amount to something like 10 or 14 days when you strip away recovery and the preseason work required to be ready for Australia. That’s not an offseason. That’s Christmas break. And then we act surprised by what happens.

The fragile nature of WTA

Players withdraw. Players get hurt. Players show up exhausted. Players who were producing spectacular tennis during the spring and summer sometimes produce decidedly unspectacular tennis in the fall. The calendar keeps asking for more after the athletes have very little left to give.

We’re already seeing reminders of how fragile the whole thing can become. Taylor Townsend withdrew from Guadalajara after a medical issue requiring emergency surgery. Marta Kostyuk, the tournament’s top seed, received a walkover because of Townsend’s withdrawal and days later pulled out of the Billie Jean King Cup Finals because of persistent wrist pain.

Every injury has its own cause, of course. You can’t point at the calendar every time somebody gets hurt and declare the case closed. But you can look at the system as a whole. Professional tennis has somehow normalized the idea that the world’s best players should spend nearly the entire year either competing, traveling, recovering from competing, preparing to compete or flying somewhere else to compete.

Then January arrives and everyone wants them fresh. It makes no sense. And it’s especially frustrating because women’s tennis doesn’t have a talent problem. Quite the opposite.

Look at Jovic. She’s 18. She’s already a two-time WTA champion. She’s already been to a Grand Slam quarterfinal. She’s knocking on the door of the Top 10. And there are several other terrific young players coming right alongside her. The WTA should be thinking obsessively about how to protect this generation and present its best product.

Instead, tennis continues treating player exhaustion as though it’s simply another charming tradition of the sport. It isn’t.

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I want to see Iva Jovic playing Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Swiatek, Coco Gauff and the rest of the world’s best players when everybody is healthy, rested and capable of producing their best tennis. I don’t want October and November to become an annual survival contest.

Jovic gave us the fun part Saturday night. She won Guadalajara again. Get used to that. There are going to be a lot more trophies. The bigger question for the WTA is how many healthy players will still be standing beside her when it’s finally time to hand them out.

Aron SolomonGuest Author

A Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist for his groundbreaking op-ed in The Independent exposing the NFL’s “race-norming” policies, Aron Solomon, JD, is a globally recognized thought leader in law, media, and strategy.

As Chief Strategy Officer for AMPLIFY, he leverages his deep expertise to shape the future of legal marketing. Aron has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania and was honored as a Fastcase 50 recipient, recognizing him among the world’s top legal innovators. A prolific commentator on law, business, and culture, his insights regularly appear in Newsweek, The Hill, Crunchbase News, and Literary Hub.

He has also been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today, ESPN, TechCrunch, BuzzFeed, Venture Beat and countless other leading global media outlets. We are proud to have Aron on board at TennisUpToDate, where his deep tennis expertise enriches the site with sharp, original columns that connect the sport to wider cultural debates.

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