American Jessica Pegula says completing an escape room with friends helped her rediscover her form and embark on a run to the US Open quarter-finals.<\/p>\n
Fourth seed Pegula needed just 54 minutes to beat a nervous Ann Li 6-1 6-2 on Sunday and keep alive her hopes of winning a career-first Grand Slam.<\/p>\n
The 31-year-old has endured a difficult summer, with a humbling first-round exit at Wimbledon followed by early round exits at WTA events in Washington, Montreal and Cincinnati.<\/p>\n
“I felt terrible coming into this tournament, honestly,” Pegula said after beating compatriot Li.<\/p>\n
After quitting midway through a practice session with world number one Aryna Sabalenka days before the US Open, Pegula’s mood improved after a night out with friends.<\/p>\n
“[We] went and did an escape room with my friends and had, like, two drinks and [realised] I need to just chill and stop getting so frustrated and overthinking all these practices,” she said.<\/p>\n
Pegula – who enjoyed a superb run to the final at Flushing Meadows 12 months ago – looked much closer to her best on Sunday as she broke Li six times on her way to victory.<\/p>\n
“I know when she’s serving well and has confidence she’s really dangerous,” Pegula said of Li, who she beat in a much tighter match at the French Open back in May.<\/p>\n
“I felt like she came out a little slow and nervous and I wanted to jump on that and not let her feel comfortable for a second, that was my motivation all match.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"American Jessica Pegula says completing an escape room with friends helped her rediscover her form and embark on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109384,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":["post-109383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}