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This week will mark the 10-year anniversary of 15-year-old Bianca Andreescu winning the prestigious Orange Bowl junior tennis tournament in south Florida.
(Sigh).
It took Andreescu less than four years from that day, when she beat American lefty Kayla Day, to win a Grand Slam title at the 2019 US Open.
That was a dizzyingly quick rise. It usually doesn’t work that way.
But as we fondly remember the big crop of Canadians who took part in that 2015 edition both on the boys’ and girls’ sides, we decided to do a bit of a deeper dive into exactly what it DOES portend.
We dug into the draws for the 2020 edition five years ago, and the 2015 edition a decade ago to see how successful those players ended up being in the pros.
Success at the junior level, historically, has been a good indicator of professional success on the women’s side. On the men’s side, somewhat less because the smaller kids can compete a lot better in the juniors than they can against fully-grown men on the ATP Tour level.
Five years seems like a long time. But unlike years ago, the girls don’t rise up to the top of the game as teenagers on a regular basis.
And more and more of the boys are choosing the college route, at least for a few years. With careers lasting a lot longer there’s less urgency to going out on tour when you’re not ready physically and mentally.
And this particular class lost a fair bit of time, because 2020 was more or less a washout because of the pandemic. Certainly the effects of that lingered into the next few years as well.
On the boys’ side, the champion was 16-year-old Arthur Fils, who defeated top seed Peter Fajta of Hungary in the final.
Always interesting is the fact that players who aren’t seeded (and wild cards, too) can end up having terrific careers even though they weren’t prodigies at a young age.
For the class of 2020, just two of the 16 seeds have made the top 50 – and none the top 20.
The champion Fils was unseeded. And 18-year-old Ben Shelton was starting his freshman year at the University of Florida. So far, those are the only two who have made the top 15.
Others who have broken through include Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, Juncheng Shang, Luca Van Assche and Nishesh Basavareddy.
Of the 19 players listed, nine played at least some college tennis. Three of them are still playing.
The full draw is here, if you want to take a look.
The most notable player in the 2020 Orange Bowl draw was No. 5 seed Diana Shnaider, who lost in the third round to France’s Océane Babel.
She chose the college route for many reasons. But she rose so quickly that tennis became a full-time job at lightning speed.
But it was wild card Ashlyn Krueger who won the Orange Bowl. And under the tutelage of Michael Joyce the last couple of years, rose up the rankings nearly as quickly.
This is not looking to be nearly as good a class as the boys, at least not so far. Only Shnaider has made the top 20; the only other player beyond Shnaider and Krueger to make a move has been France’s Elsa Jacquemot. And she hasn’t broken into the top 50 yet.
Now, the fun part.
Let’s travel back a decade to a spectacular vintage – and inarguably the best Canadian junior crop ever when you combine the boys and the girls.
These players are in their mid-20s, now; so we can get a good sense of those who’s made it, and who won’t see that kind of success.
There were three Canadian boys in the 2015 draw – all of them top-10 juniors.
And while none of them did much at the Orange Bowl (15-year-old Félix Auger-Aliassime had just had a big week across the state in Bradenton, winning the Eddie Herr tournament. So he didn’t have a lot of gas left in the tank at the end of a long year), two of them hit it big.
Ben Sigouin, who was more of a late bloomer and ended up playing college tennis, struggled as a pro although he did hit the top 200 in doubles.
He recently retired, joined the staff at Florida State University as an assistant men’s coach – and got married a couple of weeks ago.
The haul so far from this crew is light on the major titles.
But many of them are mainstays at the top of the game.
Making the top five: Casper Ruud, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Auger-Aliassime.
Making the top 10: Alex de Minaur and Denis Shapovalov.
Add to that Miomir Kecmanovic (who won the tournament), Tomas Martin Etcheverry, Alexei Popyrin, J.J. Wolf and Wu Yibing, and you have a quality harvest.
Here is the full draw from the 2015 Orange Bowl boys’ singles
On the girls’ side that year, there were four Canadians. And Andreescu, the best of the bunch and just 15, took the title. She had also won the 16-and-under category at the Orange Bowl before that.
So far, two Grand Slam titles for this crop as Sofia Kenin, who was the No. 1 seed playing in her backyard but who went out in the first round to Olga Danilovic, win the Australian Open in 2020.
Here’s the 2015 Orange Bowl girls’ singles draw.
Among the seeds, seven have made the top 100 (just two in the top 20 – the two major winners, both of whom peaked at No. 4).
But what makes this 2015 vintage so impressive is that there are six more players, either unseeded or wild cards in that 2015 event, who made the top 50, or close.
Notable among them is Amanda Anisimova, who was just 14 at the time. So many solid players who populate the draws in 2025.
Back 15-20 years ago, the Orange Bowl was a bit of a different animal as many more of the very, very best juniors played it.
When you flash forward 15 years, the assumption is that nearly all of them are retired, because they’d all be in their 30s by now.
Let’s look.
On the men’s side, the winner was George Morgan, the British No. 9 seed. Morgan peaked at No. 649 two years later, and last played just two years after that.
The Brits, overall, had three seeds: Oliver Golding (No. 6) and Liam Broady (No. 10) were the other two. They probably thought they were sitting pretty. But only Broady had a little success – and even that, fairly late on. He’s just now coming back from a long injury break.
Surprisingly few successful pros came out of this group – the best of which, obviously, was No. 2 seed Dominic Thiem (who lost to Joris de Loore of Belgium in the quarters).
Beyond that: American Bjorn Fratangelo had a serviceable career (and now is a Grand Slam champion coach alongside his wife, Madison Keys). So did Ryan Harrison and Thiago Monteiro – who is still active.
No. 3 seed Mate Pavic, who made the quarters, has been a top doubles player for years – a multiple Grand Slam champion.
On the women’s side the recently retired Lauren Davis won it all, over Monica Puig in the semis and Grace Min in the final.
There are lot more women from that year who’ve made a living, compared to the men. And more of them are still playing – logical, since the girls playing the 18s tend to be a couple of years younger than the boys.
Daria Saville – nee Gavrilova – was the top seed. She’s still active, but offline for a bit as she awaits her first child with husband Luke Saville.
No. 2 seed Elina Svitolina met Genie Bouchard in the first round, and Bouchard won; Svitolina was the reigning Roland Garros junior champion.
Jessica Pegula lost to Margarita Gasparyan and her beauteous one-handed backhand in the first round.
The bottom four names in that draw were: Gasparyan, Pegula, Bouchard and Svitolina, in that order. Tough section.
No. 6 Caroline Garcia lost to an … immortal wild card named Skylar Alexandra Morton in the first round.
Beyond that? Madison Keys, Donna Vekic, Yulia Putintseva (who turns 30 today!), doubles players Demi Schuurs, Miyu Kato and Irina Khromacheva, Monica Puig, Alyson Van Uytvanck (retired and a new mother), Viktoriya Tomova, Sachia Vickery and Eri Hozumi.
As far as we can tell from memory, 14 of the players in the 64-player draw are still active.
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