MEET SHUAI ZHANG

With a football player father and basketball player mother, Shuai Zhang has a sporting pedigree like no other. So it’s no surprise that at just 6 years of age the Chinese player already had a racquet in her hands, taking her first shots at a local club. She subsequently made her professional debut at age 14, and had already notched up her first WTA point by age 15. But her emergence as a force to reckon with had to wait until 2013, the season when she won her first title in Guangzhou (China); she would later win back the same trophy in 2017. Her most consistent season to date was in 2016 when she reached the quarter-finals of a Grand Slam for the first time at the Australian Open, and peaked in the rankings at number 23 in the world.