Credit: Like tears in rain
Mirra Andreeva is the best teenager on the WTA tour, and it isn’t close. She’ll finish 2024 ranked 16th on the official points table, more than one hundred places ahead of her closest teenage competitor, Maya Joint. Andreeva is a year younger than Joint, and she’s two years younger than Ella Seidel, third on the under-20 list.
Players who outpace their fellow teenagers typically go on to notable careers. Here’s the list of top teenagers at the end of each season this century:
Year Player Rank 2000 Serena Williams 6 2001 Kim Clijsters 5 2002 Kim Clijsters 4 2003 Vera Zvonareva 13 2004 Maria Sharapova 4 2005 Maria Sharapova 4 2006 Maria Sharapova 2 2007 Nicole Vaidisova 12 2008 Agnieszka Radwanska 10 2009 Caroline Wozniacki 4 2010 Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova 21 2011 Christina McHale 43 2012 Sloane Stephens 38 2013 Eugenie Bouchard 32 2014 Madison Keys 30 2015 Belinda Bencic 14 2016 Daria Kasatkina 26 2017 Catherine Bellis 46 2018 Dayana Yastremska 58 2019 Bianca Andreescu 5 2020 Iga Swiatek 17 2021 Emma Raducanu 19 2022 Coco Gauff 7 2023 Coco Gauff 3 2024 Mirra Andreeva 16
There’s no such thing as a can’t-miss prospect in women’s tennis, but showing up on this list gets you pretty close. Andreeva’s case is particularly extreme, because she is still just 17 years old.
In the under-18 category, the young Russian has virtually no competition. Only three other under-18s rank among the top 200, none closer than Alina Korneeva at 176th. No woman so young has finished inside the top 20 in almost two decades, going back to Nicole Vaidisova’s top-ten showing in 2006.
Here’s another way to look at what Andreeva has accomplished. With four victories to reach the Ningbo final in October, she increased her career tour-level main-draw win count to 48. Take a look at the list of all women, post-Vaidisova, to post even 30 such wins before their 18th birthday:
Wins Player Last Win as 17yo 32 Victoria Azarenka 2007-07-30 47 Caroline Wozniacki 2008-06-23 42 Tamira Paszek 2008-09-15 32 Donna Vekic 2014-06-23 33 Amanda Anisimova 2019-07-29 64 Coco Gauff 2022-03-07 48 Mirra Andreeva 2024-10-14
Again, good company, and think of all the stars who aren’t here. You know, everybody (besides Vekic) for a decade. In this entire time span of about 17 years, Andreeva has done more at her age than anyone except Coco Gauff. The Russian might even erase that caveat. She doesn’t turn 18 until the end of April, and this year, she had won 12 matches by that time. 17 wins–enough to surpass Gauff–is hardly out of reach.
Let’s turn now to how Andreeva is achieving so much success, and why she might soon lop a digit off of her age-defying ranking.
Returns first
Forget about all this under-18 and teenager stuff for a minute. Mirra is already one of the best returners in the game. Here are the top dozen WTA tour regulars, ranked by return points won:
This isn’t a perfect measure. For one thing, Andreeva faced one of the weaker schedules of players on this list. Her median opponent was ranked 58th, compared to 30th for Iga and 42nd for Coco. It would take considerably more work to suss out whether Andreeva’s 47.3% of return points won, against her set of opponents, is better or worse than, say, Aryna Sabalenka’s 45.3% against competition nearly as stiff as Swiatek’s.
The quibbles mean that we can’t quite proclaim the Russian a top-three returner. The point, though, is that she’s in the conversation. In fact, if we narrow our view to matches against top-20 players–limiting if not eliminating the influence of each woman’s schedule–Andreeva hangs on to her position:
(We’re not talking about Iga today, but… 47% of return points won against top-20 opponents? My word.)
Where Andreeva shines even brighter is against first serves. She won first-serve return points at a higher clip than any other woman on tour this year:
Player 1st RPW% Mirra Andreeva 42.6% Coco Gauff 42.1% Marketa Vondrousova 40.8% Iga Swiatek 40.8% Daria Kasatkina 40.7% Marta Kostyuk 40.5% Elina Avanesyan 40.0% Jasmine Paolini 40.0% Katerina Siniakova 39.5% Karolina Muchova 39.5%
Put that in perspective: Andreeva wins more first-serve return points than Barbora Krejcikova (to pick one name from several) wins all return points.
Again, the Russian’s stats are influenced by her level of competition. Against top-20 opponents, Mirra falls to third place, behind Swiatek and just back of Gauff. But you get the idea. To say, “Well, actually, she’s not quite up to Gauff’s standard” is to say we’re dealing with a special player.
Precocious patience
Andreeva’s serve is good for a 17-year-old, but as we’ve seen, it’s not the side of her game that has put her in the top 20. Her returns, and by extension, her baseline play, are responsible for that.
Among top players, Mirra is currently most similar to countrywoman Daria Kasatkina. The two Russians, according to Match Charting Project data, post average rally lengths of 4.9 strokes, more than anyone else in the top 40. Both women are effective off both wings; Andreeva’s backhand is the better of the two, while Kasatkina’s forehand scores more points. The teenager is a bit more likely to force the issue: While both rank well below average in Rally Aggression Score, Mirra is closer to the norm.
A key difference shows up in their rally breakdowns. Again based on the subset of matches logged by the Match Charting Project, here are each woman’s percent of points won at various rally length categories:
Player 1-3 W% 4-6 W% 7-9 W% 10+ W% Andreeva 49.8% 48.6% 51.8% 53.8% Kasatkina 48.0% 45.6% 51.0% 52.5%
The first thing that pops out here is that Andreeva is better in every category, something that reflects both the vagaries of the uneven tennis schedule and the non-random nature of Match Charting Project samples. However you slice it, Mirra won more points, though my Elo rankings agree with the official formula that Kasatkina was the better player.
To get a better idea of what we’re looking at, let’s normalize each woman’s rally-category splits as if they won exactly half of their overall points:
Player 1-3 W% 4-6 W% 7-9 W% 10+ W% Andreeva 49.5% 48.3% 51.5% 53.5% Kasatkina 49.6% 47.1% 52.7% 54.2%
The teenager holds the edge in the 4-6-stroke category, while Kasatkina looks better in the longer rallies.
That 4-6-shot category tells us more than it lets on. Andreeva’s 48.3% (or the un-normalized 48.6%) doesn’t look very impressive. Points in this group account for one quarter of all the points she plays, and she loses more than half.
But consider her playing style. Medium-short rallies are often determined by the lingering influence of the serve: The returner might withstand a plus-one attack, only to leave a sitter for the server to put away. Or a strong return doesn’t finish the point, but the returner’s next shot–the fourth stroke of the rally–does the job. 4-6-shot rallies go disproportionately to big hitters: Aryna Sabalenka led the category this year.
For someone like Andreeva or Kasatkina, the task is to limit the damage. Get the serve back, try to neutralize the point. Place serves where aggressive returners won’t do too much damage. If a big return comes back, play the same defense that works against the serve. Kasatkina has all of those skills, but there is only so much she can do. Mirra, with her flatter strokes and somewhat bigger weapons, can keep opponents from running away with these medium-short points. She’ll lose sometimes to the likes of Sabalenka, but unless they catch her on an off day, she won’t be blown off the court.
Growth potential
If Andreeva could be characterized as a younger, somewhat more aggressive Kasatkina, that would be a pretty good compliment for a 17-year-old. But the teenager promises to become much more.
One of my favorite bits of counterintuitive tennis wisdom is that return stats rarely improve. Returning is based on a set of skills–anticipation, quickness, speed–that, on net, decline with age. Whatever tactical savvy a player picks up as she ages will, at best, cancel out the age-related decline. This isn’t an iron law, but it’s surprising how often players reach their peak return effectiveness very early in their careers.
The same is not true for the serve. 17-year-olds (or, hey, 23-year-olds) have the capacity to get stronger. Footspeed and reaction time don’t figure into the serve, so with better coaching or targeted practice (think late-career Djokovic), serve stats can improve even as the rest of a player’s game declines. A couple of examples: Maria Sakkari steadily improved her first-serve win rate from the 13th percentile to the 93rd percentile in five years. Simona Halep’s first-serve was in the top quarter of tour regulars in 2014; two years earlier, it had been one of the WTA’s worst.
The implications for Andreeva are clear. We don’t need to wishcast an improvement in her return game: She’s already one of the best returners in the game. Instead, the road to the top ten and beyond goes through her serve. Her results so far are adequate. She won 58.4% of her serve points in 2024, compared to a top-50 average of 58.7%. When we consider how much she played on clay, that number looks a bit better. On hard courts, she won more serve points than average.
Mirra, then, doesn’t face the same uphill struggle that Sakkari and Halep overcame. Her potential trajectory is more like, say, Victoria Azarenka’s. Vika arrived on the scene as a killer returner with a good-enough serve. In 2009 and 2010, she won nearly half of her return points against 58% to 59% of her service points. That combination earned her two top-ten finishes. (She was a few years older than Andreeva at that point, yet another reminder of how unique the Russian’s early success has been.)
Two years later, Azarenka boosted her rate of serve points won to 61%. Combined with the same results on return that had gotten her into the top ten, the bigger serve earned her six titles–including her first major–and the year-end number one ranking. 59% to 61% may not sound like much, but for an elite returner, that’s all it takes.
If Andreeva did the same, lifting her 58.4% serve-point win rate to 61%, she’d be the ninth-best server on tour. Remember how she’s just a tick behind Coco Gauff on return? A Vika-like serve boost would put her ahead of the American in that category, outweighing Coco’s narrow edge on return. Shorter version: She’d be a top-three player, maybe more.
None of this is guaranteed. It may not–it probably won’t!–happen right away. For every Azarenka, there’s a Nicole Vaidisova or, worse, an injury victim like Catherine Bellis. Still, few paths to the top are marked so clearly. For Mirra Andreeva, a modest, achievable set of improvements are all that stand between her and the top.
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I find it interesting that the lists you posted are dominated by the players from the former Soviet countries (and Eastern Europe, more generally). In the first top-12 list, there are 6 players from former Soviet countries and 10 from Eastern Europe; in the second top-11 list, there are 7 players from former Soviet Countries and 8 from Eastern Europe.
I wonder if there is something about the Soviet/Eastern European approach to tennis that helps produce elite returners…
Yeah, I noticed that as well. I don’t know enough about how players are developed in Eastern Europe to speculate on the specifics. (And I’m sure that it’s very different for, say, Czechs and Russians.) I suspect that North Americans and Western Europeans are more serve-focused in general, and they are more likely to train on faster hard courts. But there are plenty of exceptions to both rules, and the way players move around geographically to train (even as juniors) make it tougher to generalize.