For all but the top eight women’s tennis players of the year, the most prestigious tournaments in the sport are in the rearview mirror.
The elite of the elite are mostly resting and preparing for the WTA Tour Finals, which starts early November in Indian Wells, Calif.
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The players still out there catching planes and pounding forehands are largely doing the same thing that a professional in any given field might do: Showing up, earning a living, and trying to be a little bit better today than they were yesterday, measuring their progress not only in trophies, prize money and rankings points but in fulfilling the goals that are harder to see on the public ledger.
For Ann Li, the 26-year-old from King of Prussia, Pa., the past two weeks have looked like milestones. Li reached a career-high of world No. 25 Monday, having beaten Aryna Sabalenka, the world No. 1 of the past two years, at the Wuhan Open in China. Li kept her cool after falling behind a set and a break, then leading 5-2 in the third, then getting dragged into a deciding tiebreak, losing nine match points along the way before converting her 10th.
This week, she entered the Japan Open in Osaka as the No. 1 seed. It’s a WTA 250 event, the lowest rung on the main tour. Winning would bring in around $37,000, roughly a third of what a player for coming through qualifying at the U.S. Open.
Li has no plans to stop her ascent any time soon. She also isn’t measuring it in points and prizes.
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“I don’t know where the roof is,” she said during an interview in August at the Cincinnati Open in Mason, Oh.
The best-known archetype in tennis is the young phenom, the teen or early 20-something who bursts onto the scene and immediately feels destined for all-time greatness. The sport craves them as much as it craves anything, searching for those preternatural stars and all the imagination and mass appeal they can bring. Nothing sells quite like hope.
Those diamonds are rare, and lately they have grown rarer in the women’s game, where teen stars used to come along often before an increase in the sport’s physicality and intensity changed things. But far more common are players like Li, who was born and raised in suburban Philadelphia after her parents emigrated from China. She spent most of the first half of her 20s managing injuries, searching for the right coach and training environment, and discovering who she is as a person and her player as she climbed to the edge of the elite.
That’s far more common a path for a tennis player, because tennis is hard and the world is big.
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“For me it’s always like I knew I was going to get there but it was just about when,” Li said this summer. “It took a bit longer than I wanted.”
Li, like every player up and down the rankings, is still in her becoming. Her talent has never been in question; she has not always been able to summon it in the tense moments when she needs it most. Li, who always has the straps of her visor pulled down over her ears, as though that might help shut out the noise, is finding it more often now.
For years, Kathy Rinaldi, the ex-pro and former leader of women’s player development for the U.S. Tennis Association, was responsible for guiding players like Li through that process. Briefly a phenom herself in the 1980s, Rinaldi knows the alchemy required to become good enough hang with the best of the best, especially if a player doesn’t have an obvious weapon, like Elena Rybakina’s serve or Sabalenka’s backhand.
Li is learning to turn her versatility into a weapon. Her serve is accurate and harrying. She can hit hard and flat as much as she can break the sidelines with her twisting, curling topspin. She likes to come forward into the court and she has the hand skills to finish points from there. She’s also 5-feet-7-inches tall and largely unimposing.
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“A lot of it is the consistency of play and the confidence, the inner confidence, Ann’s a great example of that.” Rinaldi said during a recent interview. “Playing those big points and having the confidence on some of those big points. There’s so many great players out here and very little sometimes separates them.”
Sabalenka found this out the hard way against Li last week in Wuhan, who said that she spent the first set getting over some nerves, which had caused a slow start. Her sluggish footwork was the tell. But Li said she never felt pressure, not when Sabalanka was two games from the match, and not when she was lacing winners to save a string of match points, an experience that might have finished off plenty of opponents.
“I think I missed one ball and then the rest, she hit winners,” Li said in a voice note sent from Osaka Tuesday.
“All I can do is say, ‘OK, good job.’ For me, it’s just focusing on each next point. And then I ended up having … I’m going to have more chances. So in the end, just tried to stay calm and know that if I keep doing what I’m doing, I’m going to have more chances.
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“And if she does, you know, winners, good for her.”
Li’s words often have this reflective quality to them, even when she’s talking about the pretty startling hinge moments of her career.
When Li traveled to Melbourne for the 2021 Australian Open, she was on one of the flights that had a passenger test positive for COVID-19 on arrival. Li spent two weeks in hard quarantine, pedaling on an exercise bike and hitting balls into a mattress propped up against the wall. When she emerged, she made the finals of a tune-up event and the third round in Melbourne.
“All we wanted to do was compete and we got stuck in this room,” she said. “So for me, that was also like just to go out there and feel grateful.”
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She made the the top 50, but then came some early losses, a nagging abdominal injury and a breakup with a coach. Before long, she was outside the top 200. In early 2024, an agent suggested she try working with Carlos Boluda of Spain. As a teenager in the 2010s, he was considered one of the next big things in the sport. It didn’t happen for him, like so many others, so he became a coach.
Li and Boluda did a trial week that June. She won a WTA 125 event, so she figured she ought to make the partnership permanent. That meant moving from the U.S. to Alicante, Spain. Li was fine with that. She missed her parents and her brother, but she and Boluda had a rare mind-meld. He prioritized happiness on the tennis court and love for the labors of the profession. So did she.
“I don’t play for money,” Li said. “I just played because I genuinely love the sport.”
She’d lost some of that during her descent down the rankings. Boluda helped her get it back. Whenever he could he turned drills into games, like seeing how many shots she could land in a box in the corner of a court. She likes to play points. They played a lot of points.
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He also told her to focus on two or three specific shots or plays during each match. Doing well in those areas was more important than the final score. That helped Li learn that she could win when playing poorly by making adjustments that didn’t immediately show up on the scoreboard — incorporating more variety, aiming for bigger targets, and running all afternoon.
An off-day no longer assured defeat. Not fighting? That would.
She went 7-5 in WTA Tour matches in 2024 as she rose back up the rankings. In 2025 she went 31-24. In 2026, with a couple of tournaments to go, she is 30-25. But lately, she’s mostly losing to the best players in the world. Rybakina at the Canadian Open and Coco Gauff in Cincinnati. Linda Nosková at the U.S. Open and Elina Svitolina in at the China Open in Beijing. Then, after beating Sabalenka, it needed Iga Świątek to knock Li out of Wuhan.
In playing them more often, Li has come to understand that despite their weapons and their star dust, the basic formula for how they win and win isn’t so different to the one that she has come to understand herself.
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“They’re super consistent, week in and week out, and also they just compete really well,” she said. “A lot of things probably don’t feel good some days, and they find a way to win. They’re problem-solving in how they trust themselves.”
In Osaka, Li is assuming the role of the hunted as the top seed. So far, she’s thriving, beating rising Turkish talent Zeynep Sönmez Thursday to reach the quarterfinals. She said she didn’t know she was the No. 1 until she arrived in Osaka, but she likes how it feels. It’s a sign of how hard she has worked.
Li wants to perform better at the Grand Slams and the biggest tour events too. She feels like she has, even if she didn’t always win as much as she might have wanted. Not winning as much as they might have wanted is a familiar feeling for just about every tennis player apart from the best of the best — and even including them. Li’s made her peace with that.
“I just want to play some good tennis and if I compete well, I can beat anyone and have a good chance of winning the tournament,” she said. “It’s just trying to finish strong and keep enjoying it.”
Stay on this path, and it could get interesting. For Li, it already is.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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