LONDON (AP) \u2014 Serena Williams will find out who she\u2019s facing in the first round at Wimbledon \u2014 for her first singles match in nearly four years, and at age 44 \u2014 when the draw is held Friday.<\/p>\n
The seven-time Wimbledon singles champion accepted a wild-card entry to the grass-court Grand Slam, where she\u2019ll also compete in doubles with her older sister Venus, who turned 46 last week.<\/p>\n
It’s all part of a tennis comeback that started with two doubles warmup matches but kicked into high gear Sunday when All England Club announced Serena would play singles.<\/p>\n
Because she has no ranking, the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion could potentially face a highly ranked player such as defending champion Iga Swiatek or No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka.<\/p>\n
Williams hasn’t played a singles match since a third-round loss to Ajla Tomljanovic at the 2022 U.S. Open. At the time, she said she didn\u2019t want to use the word \u201cretiring\u201d and instead declared she was \u201cevolving\u201d away from tennis. Her second daughter was born in 2023.<\/p>\n
Williams’ most-recent appearance at Wimbledon was in 2022 when she lost in the opening round to then-115th-ranked Harmony Tan.<\/p>\n
No. 1 Jannik Sinner, the defending singles champion, is the top-seeded men’s player. Sabalenka is the women\u2019s top seed. Wimbledon seedings follow the ATP and WTA rankings.<\/p>\n
Novak Djokovic, a seven-time champion at the All England Club, is the No. 7 seed. Two-time champion Carlos Alcaraz, who lost to Sinner in the 2025 final, will miss this year\u2019s tournament because of a wrist injury.<\/p>\n
Wimbledon starts on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON (AP) \u2014 Serena Williams will find out who she\u2019s facing in the first round at Wimbledon \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":761129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64302,4909,64,63,962,295776,2636,754,3592,146000,146002,145996,145998,363453,6413,363452,85,747],"class_list":["post-761128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ajla-tomljanovic","tag-aryna-sabalenka","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-carlos-alcaraz","tag-harmony-tan","tag-iga-swiatek","tag-jannik-sinner","tag-novak-djokovic","tag-package-100024-ap-online","tag-package-100502-member-choice-sports-option","tag-product-30599-ap-sports-news-s-wire-only","tag-product-32562-ap-online-other-sports-news","tag-product-32564-ap-online-tennis-news","tag-serena-williams","tag-serena-williams-sinner-wimbledon-draw","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761128","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=761128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}