18-year-old star Iva Jovic successfully defended her WTA 500 title in Guadalajara, easing to a 6-4, 6-2 victory over fellow American Peyton Stearns on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
Jovic<\/a>, who captured her maiden WTA Tour crown in Mexico last year, cruised through the draw, not dropping a single set all tournament. She will now move to a career-high ranking of 13th in the world on Monday.<\/p>\n “It’s amazing to be back here in the final with this beautiful trophy and this sombrero. I love it here. You guys have given me so much energy. The crowd is my favourite thing about coming here, so thank you so much for being here,” Jovic said during her victory speech.<\/p>\n “I’m just happy with the improvements I’ve made throughout the year. I think I’ve shown that I’m a more complete and better player than I was this time around last year.”<\/p>\n The American’s route to a second career title saw her beat Zeynep Sonmez<\/a>, Magdalena Frech<\/a> and Cristina Bucsa<\/a>.<\/p>\n It has been a superb year for Jovic, who made the quarter-finals of the Australian Open at the start of the year before reaching the second week at Wimbledon and the US Open.<\/p>\n See all the stats from her final triumph.<\/a><\/p>\n Tolga Akdeniz is a global senior editor for Flashscore, specialising in football, basketball and tennis. Our resident Turkish football expert, he can often be found devouring the Super Lig. Tolga lives in London – you can follow him on\u00a0X<\/a> and YouTube<\/a>, and read his latest features right here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"18-year-old star Iva Jovic successfully defended her WTA 500 title in Guadalajara, easing to a 6-4, 6-2 victory…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":855318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":["post-855317","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\/855317","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=855317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/855318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}