Eager to learn, listen—and emulate some of the game’s greatest players—the young American embraces each mile marker on her voyage to turn Grand Slam dreams into realities.
Ann Li defeated María Camila Osorio Serrano, 6-1, 6-4, to win her first career WTA title in Tenerife.
Last year, instead of her regular training regimen at the USTA National Campus in Florida, Ann Li was quarantining with her parents in her childhood home outside Philadelphia. On a bathroom mirror hung five Post-it notes.
Li had just finished reading David Goggin’s Can’t Hurt Me, a manifesto by the former Navy SEAL to inspire people to achieve fulfillment by overcoming obstacles and reaching personal goals. Each chapter includes exercises designed to further one’s quest; objectives are to be put in writing.
Sprawled across Li’s sticky notes are her missions: to win each of the four Grand Slam tournaments, and become the No. 1 player in the world.
Other words she’s jotted down: “meditate,” “visualize success,” and “stop caring about what other people think.” None of that is easy for a professional athlete, especially a just-turned 21-year-old who is on the cusp of some professional breakthroughs.
Over the last 10 months, Li has thrust herself into the tennis conversation with results that have brought her close to the Top 50 for the first time. It all began at last year’s US Open when she routed 13th-seeded Alison Riske in the second round, 6–0, 6–3, before a loss to former No. 1 Angelique Kerber marked her best finish at a major.
After ending last season by winning the $80,000 ITF World Tour/USTA Pro Circuit event in Tyler, Texas, Li kicked off 2021 by reaching the final of the Grampians Trophy, a tournament held for players who endured a hard quarantine in Melbourne just before the Australian Open. She shared the title with Anett Kontaveit when the final match was cancelled. Her run included a semifinal win over Jennifer Brady, a 2020 US Open semi finalist who would go on to reach the Australian Open final two weeks later.
But while Brady’s deep run Down Under garnered big headlines, Li’s third-round push was notable in its own right. She beat Zhang Shuai and Alize Cornet, two higher-ranked players, to reach another major third round before losing to red-hot Aryna Sabalenka. At her next event, in Monterrey, Li reached the semifinals. Ranked 148th in the world at the end of 2019, Li surged to a career-high No. 67 in mid-March.
Unlike fellow Americans Coco Gauff and Amanda Anisimova—both of whom won WTA titles as teens—Li’s climb has been slow and steady, and without the accompanying fanfare and sizzle.
At 5’7”, Li can’t rely on shell-shocking opponents with brute force. But her serve is potent, and she often follows it up with crushing forehands. She’s not afraid of the net, as she showed in 2017, when she finished runner-up in Wimbledon juniors.
During last year’s lengthy, COVID-induced off-season, she focused diligently on her conditioning and strength-training. Working with fitness coach Brent Salazar, Li found herself running and using the AssaultBike with such ferocity that she was often in tears mid-workout.
"One thing about Ann is that she’s playing a little bit of catch-up,” says Henner Nehles, a former USTA coach with whom Li began working with last fall. “Because she went to traditional school longer, she hasn’t had the volume of practice that others have had. Some of these younger players, like Anisimova and [Caty] McNally, have been on a court four, five hours a day since they were very young. The mind/body maturity also needs to come together. She’s still young. She needs more experience.
“But one thing about Ann is that she’s a great listener. That’s her gift. She always wants to get better. She’s professional. She shows up every day willing to do the work. She has a real sense of intensity and accountability.”
Li has taken pains to study and model her game style and demeanor after some of the all-time greats. She met her idol, Roger Federer, at the Wimbledon Champions Ball in 2017, but she also tries to incorporate the best qualities of Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Justine Henin, Kim Clijsters and Li Na into her game.
Li is not the best tennis player to hail from King of Prussia, Pa. That honor belongs to sisters Barbara and Kathy Jordan. Barbara was the 1979 Australian Open champion; Kathy was ranked No. 5 in 1984, a year after she lost to Martina Navratilova in the Australian Open final. Li had never heard of the Jordans, though her mother once introduced a very young Ann to Bob Jordan, the sisters’ father.
Li’s parents, Feng and Jianchao, emigrated from China but were not, contrary to previous reports, college athletes. Her father played recreational soccer and her mother ran track for leisure. An older brother, Fred, played on the high school tennis team and, in a story not unheard of in the professional ranks, Ann tagged along to lessons until the pro identified her as the family’s true tennis talent.
Ultimately, Li ended up playing at the Arthur Ashe Youth Tennis Center in Philadelphia, now called Legacy Youth Tennis & Education. Before long, she was a top American junior, winning the National 18 Clay Courts in 2016 alongside boys’ winner Sebastian Korda. A year later, she reached the junior final at Wimbledon, losing to Claire Liu in the first all-American girls’ final since Mary Lou Piatek beat Alycia Moulton in 1979.
Li describes herself as “really calm and really relaxed, just a chill person overall,” though she says she’s not as quiet as people think. Those qualities, she says, helped her not only in 2020, but this January, when she was forced into hard quarantine when passengers on her flight to Melbourne in January tested positive for COVID, and she was unable to train for two weeks.
The Post-it notes still adorn Li’s bathroom mirror more than a year later. She reads them every time she returns home, a vivid reminder of how much she still has to work for.
And she won’t take them down until all five goals have been realized.
