The new top women’s doubles player in the world is from the South Side.
For Taylor Townsend, 29, who hasn’t held a No. 1 ranking since she was a junior, the achievement is both a “dream come true” and part of a larger lesson for a player who hasn’t fit the mold of professional tennis.
Townsend’s game itself is unlike that of most of her peers.
A lefty who aggressively rushes the net, she is a throwback to a bygone era, more Martina Navratilova than the power baseliners of today. Last year, she finally cracked the top 50 in singles rankings.
In doubles, though, she’s an absolute force. With a boxer’s lightning reflexes and quick feet, she seems everywhere at the net, leaping backward to smash a lob or pouncing to cut off a ball hit to her partner’s side of the court.
“Doubles allows me to see things in a more creative way,” Townsend said in an interview from Montreal, where she was competing in a high-level tournament considered a hard-court warm up for the U.S. Open in New York.
Starting next week, Townsend will try to win her first U.S. Open doubles title, alongside her frequent partner Katerina Siniakova from the Czech Republic. Townsend believes all her success in doubles can carry over to her singles matches there as well.
“Winning begets winning,” her coach, John Williams, explained. “You have to have a certain mindset.”
A rising phenom, an ugly incident
Townsend spent her early summers in Chicago playing at public courts around the South Side. At Tuley Park, on 90th Street; at Jackson Park; at Lake Meadows, which is still home to the Chicago Prairie Tennis Club, a group formed in 1912 by Black players who were barred from segregated leagues.
Townsend says Chicago’s Black tennis scene during her childhood felt close-knit and supportive, “a family affair.”
Her mother, Sheila, an educator who played college tennis, often partnered in doubles with Ilona Young, who along with her husband, Donald, ran a tennis program for kids. The Youngs’ own son, Donald Jr., several years older than Townsend, was another South Side phenom who would later go pro. It was only natural that Taylor and her older sister, Symone, also played.
Townsend started as a righty. But she often stumbled on court. The Youngs made her switch hands to improve her balance. And they were firm about it.
Townsend said, “They were like, ‘We don’t want to hear anything. You’re not allowed to put the racket back in your right hand.’”
For juniors trying to make it to the highest tennis echelons, it’s a disadvantage to live in the inner-city, and even more so a cold-weather one. You need to be able to play year round. The regional tournaments are usually in the suburbs; the sectionals and nationals much farther away.
In 2004, the Youngs moved their family and their tennis program to the Atlanta area. The Townsends made the hard decision to follow them. Taylor was 8, Symone 10.
Their father, Gary Townsend, landed a job in Atlanta as an assistant principal, and then a high school principal. The girls also thrived, achieving national rankings.
Symone would suffer a serious leg injury. But Taylor continued to improve. In 2012, at 15, she won the junior Australian Open, in both singles and doubles. Townsend turned 16 that spring and captured the junior doubles title at Wimbledon.
That’s when something ugly happened. The United States Tennis Association, which supports the country’s top youth, told Townsend she was overweight. The USTA ordered her to report to its tennis center for eight weeks of fitness training, the timing of which would force her to miss the U.S. Open.
“I was fat, and I was Black, so they took away my dream,” Townsend later wrote about the incident in a 2021 essay for The Players’ Tribune.
Townsend definitely didn’t have the body type of most top players, but she was 16, and the No. 1 ranked junior in the world. Townsend felt abandoned. (After a short stint in the training program, she paid her own way and played the U.S. Open anyway, winning the junior doubles title and making it to the quarterfinals in singles.)
“Being a teenage girl, having to talk about her body, her weight, like on a worldwide stage,” she said. “It was always a topic of conversation.”
Townsend turned pro at the end of that year.
“I had to grow up early. But it also taught me how to take a stand on something,” Townsend now says.
“Do it my own way”
Townsend’s early years on the pro circuit were up and down, her singles ranking falling outside the top 300 at one point. She suffered from depression. For a while her coach kept the media away. But she has become a tour veteran, earning more than $6.5 million in prize money.
She had her best Grand Slam singles result at the 2019 U.S. Open, reaching the fourth round.
In 2020, she was getting ready for a match when she started vomiting. Multiple pregnancy tests confirmed the cause. She Googled, “Can you play tennis pregnant?” She won that match. “I played so good,” she recalled.
Since returning from maternity leave — and joining a small but growing club of mothers on tour — Townsend has been on a doubles tear. She has now won 10 doubles titles overall, including last year’s Wimbledon and this year’s Australian Open, both with Siniakova.
Last month, when she won the title at a tournament in Washington, D.C., partnering with China’s Zhang Shuai, Townsend brought her son, Adyn, now 4, on court for the trophy presentation.
“This is all for you, baby,” she told him.
The professional tennis schedule is grueling, and excelling at both singles and doubles can be challenging even logistically. Townsend missed her qualifying singles match at the tournament in Montreal because it was at the same time as her doubles final in D.C. But she takes doubles and singles equally seriously.
At the U.S. Open on Tuesday, Townsend will also play mixed doubles with the 22-year-old American star Ben Shelton in a new format meant to bring attention to an event that has often gone overlooked: fourteen teams, pairing many of the world’s top men and women, four-game sets, the champions splitting a million-dollar purse.
Some have dismissed the event as a marketing gimmick that excludes players who make their livelihoods as doubles specialists. But Townsend is open-minded about it.
“This is something that’s so new,” she said. “So I’m excited to see how it goes.”
Townsend will also be wearing her own apparel brand, featuring a “TT” logo for her initials. She hasn’t had a clothing sponsor since 2017.
“There have been so many people who haven’t accomplished the things that I have and are full head to toe kitted,” Townsend said. “And so I was like, I’m just going to take matters into my own hands and do it my own way.”
She’s working with the Black designer Alexander John — who has developed styles for Puma, Kenneth Cole and Beyoncé — and they’ll be doing a pop-up shop in New York during the tournament before trying to sell more widely next year.
“It’s empowering, too, to be able to wear my own stuff,” Townsend said.
When not on tour, Townsend lives in Atlanta, where she still practices on public courts, an invitation to the game for all who see her. She believes representation must also involve accessibility. It’s also just who she is, her father insists. “She’s just a regular girl that loves to play,” he said.
Although Townsend hasn’t lived full-time in Chicago for decades, she still identifies as a South Sider.
“All my family is still there, both my mom’s and my dad’s side,” Townsend said. “It’s where a lot of my core memories were made.”