controversial incident in 2001<\/a>.<\/p>\n“It’s an honor to award the first wild card of this year’s event to Venus Williams,” tournament director Tommy Haas said Friday. “Venus is a legend of the game, and one of the most accomplished players our sport has ever seen.”<\/p>\n
It will be Williams’ 10th career appearance in the tournament, which runs March 4-15. A year ago, she was given a wild card, but didn’t accept it.<\/p>\n
“I’m so excited to be heading back to Indian Wells and can’t wait to return home to play in California,” Williams said.<\/p>\n
She most recently competed in the Australian Open, losing in the first round in singles and doubles.<\/p>\n
Williams is scheduled to compete in the ATX Open, a WTA 250 event in Austin, Texas, that starts Saturday and runs through March 1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Feb 20, 2026, 02:24 PM ET INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Venus Williams is getting a wild card into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-481950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}