{"id":402894,"date":"2026-02-01T21:26:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T21:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/402894\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T21:26:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T21:26:07","slug":"mimi-xu-named-tennis-wales-player-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/402894\/","title":{"rendered":"Mimi Xu named Tennis Wales&#8217; player of the year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Chris Lewis, head of performance at Tennis Wales, says 2026 promises to be an equally successful year for Welsh tennis. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It&#8217;s going to be really exciting following Mimi, she&#8217;s getting accepted into the Grand Slam events by ranking now, so we should see her in qualifiyng and also in the main draw,&#8221; he said. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We&#8217;ve got three or four players coming just behind Mimi that are playing on the professional circuit. They all have career-high rankings as they move up through the levels.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Lewis also expects last year&#8217;s player of the year, Wales number one James Story, to push on, while 19-year-old Viktor Frydrych is just breaking through on the men&#8217;s circuit, having been a top 20 junior in the world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;There&#8217;s an exciting group of juniors as well,&#8221; added Lewis.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;They&#8217;re heading off to US college for the next stage of their careers and hoping to play the grass courts at some of the major events, including Junior Wimbledon.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Watch out for players like Oliver Page, Archie Gray and Niall Pickard-Barua who are all playing at the top end of the junior ITF tournaments.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chris Lewis, head of performance at Tennis Wales, says 2026 promises to be an equally successful year for&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":402895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-402894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}