INDIAN WELLS, Calif. \u2014 Venus Williams is getting a wild card into the singles and doubles draws for the BNP Paribas Open next month in the Southern California desert.<\/p>\n
The 45-year-old will be making her first appearance in the tournament since 2024, when she lost in the first round as a wild card. She\u2019s a three-time semifinalist, most recently in 2018. She boycotted the event between 2002 and 2016 after a controversial incident in 2001.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an honor to award the first wild card of this year\u2019s event to Venus Williams,\u201d tournament director Tommy Haas said Friday. \u201dVenus is a legend of the game, and one of the most accomplished players our sport has ever seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
It will be Williams\u2019 10th career appearance in the tournament, which runs March 4-15. A year ago, she was given a wild card, but didn\u2019t accept it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so excited to be heading back to Indian Wells and can\u2019t wait to return home to play in California,\u201d 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":"INDIAN WELLS, Calif. \u2014 Venus Williams is getting a wild card into the singles and doubles draws for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-482837","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\/482837","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=482837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}