Three years ago, American Peyton Stearns picked up her first WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz main-draw win at the ATX Open — her adopted hometown tournament after a fruitful college tennis career at the nearby University of Texas — and reached the quarterfinals. Since then, Stearns maintained it would be nice if a Longhorn could take the tournament’s trophy.<\/p>\n
Austin:\u00a0Scores<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Draws<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Order of play<\/a><\/p>\n The 2022 NCAA champion made good on that promise on Sunday with a 7-6(8), 7-5 win over fellow American Taylor Townsend — a gritty 2 hour and 22-minute win that earned her a second tour-level singles title.\u00a0<\/p>\n Stearns, currently ranked No. 53, came into the tournament having lost in the first round in each of the last two years — and when she lost the opening set of her first match of the week against Francesca Jones, an unlucky hat trick seemed a realistic possibility. But she rallied for that win, and won two more three-setters in the three subsequent rounds to advance to her first tour-level singles final in nearly two full years — and first on hard courts. Stearns last reached a final on tour in May of 2024, when she won the clay-court WTA 250 in Rabat, Morocco.<\/p>\n Against Townsend, she trailed again — having lost the only prior meeting between the two compatriots. The left-hander, contesting her first WTA singles final, led for almost the entirety of the first set, and had two set points on Stearns’ serve at 5-3. But the 24-year-old saved them both, and saved another in the tiebreak — before finally wrapping up the set herself on her fifth opportunity.<\/p>\n In the second set, Townsend was the one who erased deficits — twice coming from a break behind — and was two points away from forcing a third set.\u00a0But Stearns stood tall to hold serve for 5-5 after being pushed to deuce from 40-0, a game that kicked off a run of three straight to her that won the match.<\/p>\n The match marked the second straight all-American title match in Austin, as Jessica Pegula beat McCartney Kessler to win the 2025 crown.<\/p>\n But hours later, Townsend made sure she wasn’t leaving Austin without the big prize: She and Storm Hunter, the top seeds in doubles, won that title with a 6-3, 6-4 victory over No. 3 seeds Eudice Chong and Liang En-shuo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three years ago, American Peyton Stearns picked up her first WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz main-draw win at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428,1959],"class_list":["post-498557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498557","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=498557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}