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A grand slam-led “premier tour” is both logical and hard to imagine, more singles stars in doubles atp to debut trial in madrid enticing singles players to join forces, atp tour to trial changes for doubles tennis: faster matches, easier entry for singles players, jannik sinner surpasses 20 million dollars in career prize money after winning miami open, dana mathewson says historic miami open invitational is “the next chapter for wheelchair tennis”, the atp tour's 2025 calendar includes expanded events in canada and cincinnati, seven of nine atp masters 1000 tournaments, including canada and cincinnati, will be 12-day events in 2025, chris eubanks signs on with fico to promote financial and credit education, the four grand slams, the two tours and saudi arabia are all hoping to revamp tennis, after boss move, taylor fritz to get free chipotle in new "dream" deal with restaurant chain, a grand slam-led “premier tour” is both logical and hard to imagine.

Is the merger of 6 different entities in tennis seriously going to happen? Even the @atptour bundle the 500’s and 250’s together with the 1000’s as a tv package so where does that leave them? If the proposed merger of the 1000’s and Slams happen, the ATP will be left with some… — Mark Petchey (@_markpetchey) November 29, 2023

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USTA CEO Lew Sherr Details Blueprint for Tennis’s Premier Tour

• Author: Jon Wertheim

Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz (20) may have beaten Italy’s Jannik Sinner (22), the latest iteration of a swelling and textured rivalry that now stands at 4–4. But the fiercest battle to play out last week in Indian Wells, Calif., did so in boardrooms and conference rooms.

Andrea Gaudenzi, chairman of the ATP, announced that he had officially secured a $1 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia to bankroll a streamlined tennis ecosystem. The hitch: a 1000-level event would be added to the calendar, to be staged in The Kingdom.

And on the other side of the net … a proposal for a Premier Tour—put forth by the four majors, presenting an uncharacteristically united front—outlining a new professional tennis model offering:

• The four majors.
• Ten other events: 96-player draws; men and women; equal prize money; all held outdoors.
• A team event.
• Year-end finals for both men and women held at the same site.
• Guaranteed off weeks before and after majors and a minimum two-month offseason.
• A PGA-style tour, open to the top 100 or so players; with a developmental tour open to players ranked roughly 101–300.

The BNP Paribas Open served as the backdrop for talks of a new tennis ecosystem.

Jayne Kamin-Oncea/USA TODAY Sports

For a sport that, historically, has done change the way the royal family does transparency, this was a jarring disruption in the truest sense. For starters, it would mean the end of the WTA and ATP tours as they have existed for decades; and the death or demotion of more than 100 tournaments that currently dot the calendar, from Dallas to Doha.

Credit/blame for the Premier Tour generally goes to Australian Open chieftain Craig Tiley, who was moved to act dramatically, threatened as he was by a Saudi event in January that would squelch Aussie Open run-up momentum. Likely because Tiley, a born deal-maker, can polarize within the sport, it is now Lew Sherr, the USTA’s chief executive officer and executive director, who has become the front-facing figure for the Premier Tour.

Sherr spoke with Sports Illustrated this week about the Premier Tour, what it is and isn’t and what problems it addresses.

The following has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Jon Wertheim: Let’s start broad and then get to specific questions. What are you presenting?

Lew Sherr: So it all starts from a proposition that tennis is an attractive sport, but that it underperforms commercially, which is creating challenges to support athletes and for the sustainability of tournaments. I don't think that's news to anybody in the industry.

We'll go back to 2021. The [seven tennis stakeholders] commissioned Boston Consulting Group to understand what the issues were in the sport and what the opportunities might be. And all of that research—which included 5,000 tennis fans around the world surveyed—pointed to the fact that tennis, while broadly popular, had 70% of tennis fans only engaging with the sport through the four majors.

So you're the fourth most popular sport in the world, but 70% of those fans are only watching the four events during the year. And the feedback also indicated that events during the season lack consequence. Fans have a hard time following the narrative. We dilute our own product. We compete with our own product. You might have six events in a given week. Fans struggle to know where they should be watching. Why is Sinner playing in Rotterdam and Alcaraz is somewhere in South America? The solution that came back from all of that fan research? The best way to present the sport to fans was in a format where the best players are playing in a prescribed sort of elite season. At the same time, you're accounting for player health, rest, peaks in performance.

JW: That takes care of fans and players. What about tournaments?

LS: From a tournament perspective, there are just too many tournaments that are not viable. And because they're diluted, they're competing with one another. So we try to address the structural impediments in the system and bring forward a more expansive, a more holistic solution that would tackle all of that. … Ten tournaments [out of roughly 140] drive 80% of all of the economics. Four of them are the Grand Slams plus six others. So it's unbelievably concentrated. I don't think I'm telling you anything that you haven't reported, that you didn't know. So what we set out to do, the slams together, unified to say, if we can lean in and try to address the structural issues that the sport is facing, maybe there's a new opportunity.

JW: If tennis’s value today is X, what are you anticipating the valuation to be if all goes to plan?

LS: We estimate—and the consultants—that number is roughly a billion dollars in annual economic lift. Now that doesn't happen overnight. You've got to build to that and there are contracts and cycles. But it is substantial. We're talking about a successful sport that still has huge, huge economic potential.

JW: The biggest objections to me would seem to be, 1) the other guys have a bag with a billion dollars in it. You have consultants’ projections. 2) Everyone thinks the sport is under-monetized. Everyone thinks it’s confusing and the calendar is too crowded. But there are dozens and dozens of 500- and 250-level events that don’t seem to fit in.

LS: Our view is that billion is redistributed below to make sure players are earning sustainable for success. It’s a reimagination. We’ve gotta separate ourselves from what exists today. The analogy with what the ATP sort of developed with the Saudis, I guess is a bit of an apples and oranges. These are not, these are not mutually exclusive opportunities.

JW: What are you telling that guy that’s dumped a lot of money into his 500-level event?

LS: We are prioritizing creating sort of sustainability at the lower levels of our sport, we think there is an enormous amount of growth. Part of our proposition: there is revenue that has to be redistributed to other events. And we think there is an opportunity to create a much more viable proposition. There are 10 events that are driving 80% of the revenue in our sport. That’s not sustainable. We need to get to a sustainable model.

JW: I’m hearing four majors and 10 events that will be 96 draws; men and women; all outdoors; and the 10th is likely a grass event pre-Wimbledon. Accurate?

LS: Yeah, our vision for the calendar reflects four Grand Slams. We think 10 is the appropriate number of Premier Tour events. I can’t overstate the importance of all combined, all equal prize day one for the sport operating entity combined. And truly creating a gender-neutral sport is absolutely paramount for us and a critical sort of piece of this thing. We also think there is an opportunity for an international team event that would fit within this calendar; and then a year-end combined event.

JW: I’ve heard two weeks of protection pre and post the four majors.

LS: There’s absolutely one week. The other piece: we’re prescribing specific play-down weeks. So we know that competition matters. And if you’re a lower-ranked player, you may not be getting enough match play. If you lose early in a model like this, there may not be enough matches for you to be at your peak performance, so we’ve identified a series of weeks over the course of the year where you could drop down to get more match play, drop into what we think would be sort of the highest level of contender tour events.

JW: Your [model] is avoiding the sportswashing issue in a way that your competing offer is not. Would you take money from Saudi Arabia if they decided to reallocate with you?

LS:  What I will tell you is that we’ve not had one conversation with an external stakeholder about investment in this. We want to get this format right. We don’t doubt that there will be a number of people lining up to potentially want to invest in this. We’re not sure that we need external investment. We might be able to do this with some sanctioned sales. So it may not require equity. But what we also know is it’s an incredibly attractive sport. And you’re seeing increased investment in sport. And we’re good.

We want to focus on delivering the product in the right way to create something that's sustainable. That's right for fans, that’s consistent with what we set out to do at the outset. I won't exclude or include anything at this stage. But right now we, we've not been pursuing external investment.

JW: What do you see as the biggest challenge to this getting done?

LS: This is a massive reimagination of the way the sport is presented and change is hard. And we want to get it right and we’re taking our time and we’re working with stakeholders to make sure that we’re thinking through all of these questions that you’re asking and others are asking, because that stuff is important. Ultimately it’s going to require change from within and that’s really hard, right?

JW: The tours, as we know them, have outstanding media rights contracts. They have venue contracts. They have vendors. They have pension plans. They’ve got liability policies. What happens if there is no ATP and WTA as we know it? And can you do it all by Jan. 1, 2026?

LS: I think putting a date on this is really hard. If that needs to happen [Jan. 1, 2026] would be achievable. My guess is you will see a transition period, but we’re up to conversations we’ve had with, with players, the conversations we’ve had with tournament owners.

Look, everybody gets it, right? I think you probably would agree. This is a better presentation of the sport. However, the how you get there is where the complexity lies, right? And, and how long does that take? And what has to happen to get there and making sure that we don't compromise to the point that you lose the integrity of the vision in order to get there.

So it’s a process and, and we are committed. We’re working as quickly as we can work, but we’re not willing to sacrifice getting it right. We’re not trying to take some shortcuts or band-aids to get to something that ultimately is not going to serve us well in the long term. 

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Professional tennis is broken. Here’s how to fix it

Tennis is doing what it does every 10-15 years or so — having a reckoning with its endless schedule, its nonsensical governing structure, and a competitive format that even devout fans struggle to understand.

The sport is played across the world, with countries on every continent except Antarctica producing top players. No major sport integrates men and women more successfully, or has come as close to pay equality, though there is work to be done on those fronts. Nearly every day of the year, an enticing professional match unfolds somewhere on the planet.

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And yet, the nearly unanimous opinion of everyone involved in the game — its leaders, its players, tournament organizers, sponsors, media executives, coaches — is that professional tennis is broken, a structural mess that exhausts its players, cannibalizes its business with dueling events and exists in a constant state of civil war among its alphabet soup of governing bodies. There are seven of them, or maybe nine or 10, depending on who is doing the counting.

“Such an amazing sport and so screwed up,” said Pam Shriver, the former star player who is now a commentator and a coach.

“I can’t even get quoted about it anymore without using bad language,” said another former player who has been involved in tennis for decades. She was right. She couldn’t.

Phil de Picciotto, the chief executive and founder of Octagon, the sports marketing firm with deep roots in professional tennis, has been in conference rooms filled with leaders of the sport trying to fix it on and off for more than 30 years. What often happens, he said, is that everyone gravitates toward one of two opposite poles.

At one end are those who favor developing the most players, which requires giving as many people as possible an opportunity to progress with tournaments all the time all over the world. At the other end is the Grand Slams – singular events that target the elite of the elite and attract the most casual of sports fans.

“Both are really important,” de Picciotto said. “People can adopt both of those bookends and they do. The battleground becomes everything in between.”

As the 2024 tennis season gets underway in Australia, what might make this reckoning different from all the previous reckonings is the near unanimity on what tennis needs to fix itself. Ask nearly anyone involved in nearly any facet of the sport how to fix it, which we did, and the same answer almost always comes back: a clearly defined, premium tennis tour built around the game’s most valuable legacy events and its best players that is easy to follow, includes both men and women and doesn’t overtax stars.

Even those who have to be against that commonly prescribed solution because there is a chance it might harm their investments — namely the owners of small and mid-sized tournaments — essentially agree this is what tennis needs. They are sports executives and they understand that nearly every other successful sport uses some version of that same formula.

No one knows exactly how to manage all the details. What jobs and events to eliminate. How to unwind all the conflicting contracts. The algorithm to divvy up the loot from a combined premium tour so that the lesser competitions that are essential for the sport’s development don’t become extinct remains a work in progress — and probably always will be.

Tennis has tried to create versions of this before, only to have the plans fall apart due to battles over territory, power and money. This time, veterans of the sport say, it feels different, a result of both desire and necessity, as leaders face a combination of internal and external pressure to change or be changed.

Fixing everything in tennis in one fell swoop may be beyond anyone’s reach, but smart, experienced people like John Morris, who represents several top players for his company, 72 Sports Group, and is a longtime tennis executive, say establishing a premier tour would represent a significant start.

“If this can happen,” Morris said, “a lot of the things that need to be corrected can be corrected.”

How we got here

The tennis world comes together each year at Wimbledon, the oldest and most prestigious tournament in the sport.

As the tennis unfolds on the grass courts, the sport’s movers and shakers, including leaders of the tours, the four Grand Slams, the International Tennis Federation, and scores of media executives, agents and corporate leaders, cut deals over glasses of Champagne and catered lunches, cocktail hours and dinners inside the corporate suites at the All England Lawn Tennis Club and the stately homes on the hilly streets nearby.

This is where, in early July, word began to circulate that Andrea Gaudenzi, the former player who is the chairman of the men’s circuit, the ATP Tour, was on the verge of a big one. Gaudenzi was closing in on a deal with Saudi Arabia to deliver a top tournament to the kingdom as soon as January 2025.

Saudi Arabia had upended golf the previous year by launching a rival tour. Gaudenzi wanted to do everything in his power to prevent that from happening in tennis.

Inviting the Saudis into the clubby upper echelon of the game by allowing them to launch a major new event seemed like the best strategy. A top Saudi event at the start of the year would likely doom the series of small and mid-sized tournaments in Australia and New Zealand during those weeks, but they weren’t Gaudenzi’s priority. Placating the Saudis was.

Then word of the deal made its way to Craig Tiley, the leader of Tennis Australia. Tiley and Tennis Australia’s other leaders were staying in a handsome brick home on a quiet block between the All England Club and Wimbledon Village. From his perch a few streets from the tournament, Tiley, a South African who played professionally before becoming a top college coach in the U.S. and evolving into a leading tennis executive, swung into action.

If Gaudenzi was going to treat key events of Tennis Australia’s annual “summer of tennis” as collateral damage, Tiley, who declined to be interviewed for this story, was going right back at him.

Long recognized as among the most innovative minds in tennis, Tiley began working the phones and the power centers at Wimbledon to get the leaders of the other three Grand Slams to support his effort to cleave the top tournaments from men’s and women’s tours, known as the “Masters” and “1,000s” to launch the premium tennis circuit that so many in the game craved.

Through the summer and fall, Tiley’s push for a tennis tour that resembled Formula One continued to gain momentum, especially within the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA), the nascent players group that Novak Djokovic co-founded three years ago. A formal proposal is expected in the coming weeks.

Why now is different

“We are closer than we ever have been,” said one longtime industry executive involved with the discussions, both this year and in the past. Like several others, he requested anonymity because he was not authorized to reveal details of internal discussions.

He then explained why he was optimistic that change was on the way.

“You have external forces in the form of Saudi Arabia and the PTPA that you didn’t have before.”

Let’s unpack that.

LIV Golf changed everything.

When Saudi Arabia launched its quest last year to upend professional golf by paying top players hundreds of millions of dollars to compete on a new rival tour, leaders of the organizations that have controlled professional tennis for the last half-century knew their supremacy could soon be under threat.

Tennis players receive roughly a quarter of the sport’s revenues, compared with about 50 per cent in major team sports. It would not take much for a deep-pocketed investor to offer the best ones a higher-paying, less demanding alternative.

Also, during the past three years, the PTPA has grown into something the sport has never had — a viable and well-financed independent platform for players to attack the status quo.

The men’s and women’s tours, the WTA and the ATP, have largely treated the PTPA as an outside agitator. In October, Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA Tour, refused to allow a PTPA representative to take part in a meeting between him and the top 20 players, more than half of whom are members of the PTPA.

The Grand Slams took another tack, using the PTPA to work with players to try to meet their workplace needs. That has helped establish a respectful management-labor dynamic and a level of trust in the Grand Slams as they work to change the competitive structure of the sport.

“A players association is here now and they understand that as something that needs to be accepted,” Vasek Pospisil, a veteran player from Canada and a founding member of the PTPA, said of the Grand Slams. “They want the players to have a seat at the table.”

It also helps that the Grand Slams share more money with the players than the regular tour events.

Finally, the Grand Slams learned in 2022 that they don’t need the tours. The tours withheld rankings points from Wimbledon last year when the All England Club and the Lawn Tennis Association, which oversees tennis in Great Britain, refused to allow players from Belarus and Russia to participate as a punishment for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The rest of the players came anyway. Stadiums were packed. Television ratings remained sky-high. No one really cared whether players received ranking points.

What would tennis look like under the new framework?

The details are still being worked out, but the broad outline is built around a premier tour for top-level players — say, roughly the top 100.

They would play at least the 14 biggest tournaments on the schedule: the Grand Slams, the 10-12 biggest and most successful tour events, and the two tour finals. They could drop down and play a few smaller tournaments, but anything that happens in those tournaments is separate from the main tour.

The premier events would include Wimbledon, the U.S., Australian and French Opens; mixed events in Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid, Rome, Toronto/Montreal, and Cincinnati; men’s tournaments in Monte Carlo, Paris and Shanghai; Women’s events in Dubai, Doha and Beijing. Other top candidates for inclusion would include events in Washington D.C., Tokyo, and possibly the men’s event in Beijing, since they are world capitals.

All the other events would be part of a developmental tour, with players outside the top 100 competing to make the premier tour. Higher-ranked players who need matches or want to collect an appearance fee could play in a few of those events each year, but the results would not count toward the premier tour standings and rankings.

The tour would be managed by a board with representatives of the Grand Slams, the other big tournaments, and representatives of the ATP and the WTA. The players would sit on the labor side of the negotiating table and collectively bargain for their share of the revenues as they do in other successful sports.

It’s unclear how the International Tennis Federation, which controls international team competitions like the Davis Cup, the Billie Jean King Cup and the Olympic tournaments, would fit into this structure, if at all. That said, the ITF is reexamining the format of its competitions right now and needs to get its own house in order first.

Why does a premier tour have so much support?

Everyone in tennis believes the season is too long and disparate. It is.

It lasts 11 months and is impossible to manage, with the seven different governing bodies constantly fighting with one another about the schedule. It is also too complicated for lay fans to keep track of.

“It’s like having a calendar with seven different discussions in seven different rooms,” Gaudenzi said in November during a meeting with a small group of journalists in Italy. “I’m trying to convince everybody we’re managing one product. We’re all part of the same book. We might write different chapters, but we’re part of the same book and we can’t sell different chapters in different bookstores.”

Selling just one “book”, to use Gaudenzi’s metaphor, would make the sport simpler to follow and likely drive up the price for media rights and sponsorships. Right now, tournaments and the different governing bodies compete with one another. That drives down prices since buyers can play one off against the other. Bundling a collection of premier tournaments, selling them together and partnering with networks dedicated to exploiting all the content the sport produces instead of just the final rounds would likely drive up investment substantially.

That would be a boon to organizers of the top tournaments and to players. They want to play less, earn more money and eliminate any incentive to play every week.

“Right now the system is structured so that if I don’t play every week I can’t get to the ranking I need,” Pospisil said. “To go up the rankings, you’ve got to play non-stop.”

Raemon Sluiter, a veteran coach, said the birth of Elina Svitolina’s first child last year gave the star from Ukraine an advantage — before she returned, she finally had the opportunity to practice for more than two months straight, far longer than the usual gruelling schedule permits. Top tennis players generally enjoy an off-season that lasts about two weeks, which isn’t enough time to make any significant changes. A slimmed-down tour could make a big difference.

The winners

“It is very good to be a 1,000 event right now,” said a top executive at a company that owns one.

Indeed, the biggest tournaments in tennis outside the Grand Slams are the belles of the ball at the moment. Tiley and the Grand Slams want them for their premier tour. The ATP and the WTA want to maintain their associations with these historic tour stops, such as Indian Wells, Miami, Madrid and Rome, so they aren’t relegated to operating the tennis minor leagues.

Also, consider a tennis investor like Ben Navarro, who recently purchased the Cincinnati Masters for roughly $300million. If Cincinnati lands a spot on the premier tour, his event is now a part of the same circuit and business operation as Wimbledon rather than, say, Delray Beach. Not bad.

The same goes for CVC Capital Partners, the private equity firm that bought a 20 per cent stake in the WTA Tour in 2023 for $150million. If the WTA can negotiate an ownership stake and a seat on the board in the premier tour, CVC is now in business with the biggest events in the sport.

The losers — but perhaps not so much

The small and medium-sized tournaments, competitions in places like Dallas, Basel, and Buenos Aires, are going to have a hard time swallowing the prospect of relegation to the minor leagues. They have spent millions of dollars on license agreements to be a part of the ATP and the WTA. Also, there is a question of whether narrowing the scope of big-time tennis to a premier tour is good for the long-term health of the professional game.

“The big difference between tennis and nearly every other sport is that tennis events are tied to participation,” said the owner of a mid-sized tournament. “F1 is a spectacle. You can’t grow a global participation sport with 14 tournaments around the world.”

That line of thinking, however, relies on the premise that interest will automatically diminish in the small and mid-sized tournaments with the advent of a premier tour, rather than understanding the appeal of a cohesive system built around promotion and relegation.

“There isn’t really a tour right now,” said John Morris, the industry veteran at the helm of 72 Sports. “It’s a circus made up of individual promoters and I say that with all due respect.”

Morris said the small- and mid-sized tournaments might be more appealing than they are now if the sport organized them into regional circuits, with players competing to make the premier tour for the following season and coveted spots throughout the season in the Grand Slams and other top events.

In other words, whoever wins in Estoril, Portugal, Charleston, S.C. or Auckland could have new import, in addition to the limited star attractions they now enjoy. Play well for six weeks on lower-tier tours and receive a wild card entry into, say, the French Open.

Most importantly, Morris said, players outside the top 100 wouldn’t go broke funding their travel around the world since they would largely play within their regions on a circuit with far more cohesion and perhaps even a minimum salary. Prize money would not necessarily have to rise all that much because the costs for players would fall.

“Finding a one-size-fits-all solution that fixes everything all at once is difficult,” Pospisil said. “As for lower-tier tournaments, I don’t think it would be worse. Maybe this results in a much bigger place for them.”

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Sean Reilly)

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Matthew Futterman is an award-winning veteran sports journalist and the author of two books, “Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed” and “Players: How Sports Became a Business.”Before coming to The Athletic in 2023, he worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Star-Ledger of New Jersey and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently writing a book about tennis, "The Cruelest Game: Agony, Ecstasy and Near Death Experiences on the Pro Tennis Tour," to be published by Doubleday in 2026. Follow Matthew on Twitter @ mattfutterman

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Charleston 2024: Dates, draws, prize money and everything you need to know

2024 Charleston

Courtney Nguyen - WTA Insider

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The Hologic WTA Tour moves to the clay next week at the Credit One Charleston Open and the Copa Colsanitsas in Bogota, Colombia. The WTA 500 event features a strong field once again, including World No.5 Jessica Pegula, defending champion Ons Jabeur, and Charleston's own Emma Navarro. 

Here's what you need to know about Charleston:

When does the tournament start?

The Credit One Charleston Open is the first WTA 500 tournament of the clay season and the only clay-court WTA tournament in North America. The tournament is played on outdoor green clay (Har-Tru) at Live to Play Daniel Island, home of Credit One Stadium. The Dunlop Grand Prix Regular Duty ball will be used. 

The tournament features a 48-player singles field (with 16 first-round byes) and a 16-team doubles field. 

Main-draw play begins on Monday, April 1. 

Charleston, South Carolina is on Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4).

Wozniacki, Haddad Maia among Charleston main-draw wild cards

Sabalenka, swiatek and gauff lead madrid entry list, beyoncé's new album 'cowboy carter' strikes a chord with wta players, when are the finals.

Both singles and doubles finals will be played on Sunday April 7. The doubles final will begin at noon, followed by the singles final at 2:30 p.m.

Who are the defending champions? 

Ons Jabeur captured the title last year, defeating defending champion Belinda Bencic 7-6(6), 6-4. The final was a rematch of the previous year's final, which Bencic won 6–1, 5–7, 6–4.

In doubles, Danielle Collins and Desirae Krawczyk defeated Giuliana Olmos and Ena Shibahara 0–6, 6–4, [14–12].

Champions Reel: How Ons Jabeur won Charleston 2023

Who is playing.

The entry cut-off was based on the Hologic WTA Tour rankings on March, 4. Paula Badosa was the last direct entry at No.73. Wild cards were awarded to Beatriz Haddad Maia, Caroline Wozniacki, Shelby Rogers and Clervie Ngounoue.

For the full player field click here . 

Projected Top 8 seeds:

1. Jessica Pegula Ranking: No.5 Best Charleston result: Semifinalist (2023) Previous tournament: Miami quarterfinal (l. Alexandrova)

2. Ons Jabeur Ranking: No.6 Best Charleston result: Champion (2023) Previous tournament: Miami second round (l. Avanesyan)

3. Maria Sakkari Ranking: No.8 Best Charleston result: Quarterfinal (2019) Previous tournament: Miami quarterfinal (l. Rybakina)

4. Daria Kasatkina Ranking: No.11 Best Charleston result: Champion (2017) Previous tournament: Miami Round 3 (l. Cirstea)

5. Beatriz Haddad Maia Ranking: No.13 Best Charleston result: First Round (2018) Previous tournament: Miami Round 3 (l. Boulter)

6. Ekaterina Alexandrova Ranking: No.16 Best Charleston result: Semifinal (2022) Previous tournament: Miami semifinal (l. Collins)

7. Elina Svitolina Ranking: No.17 Best Charleston result: Round of 16 (2014) Previous tournament: Miami second round (l. Osaka)

8. Madison Keys Ranking: No.18 Best Charleston result: Champion (2019) Previous tournament: Miami Round of 16 (l. Rybakina)

In addition to the Top 8 seeds, the tournament will feature four major champions, with Victoria Azarenka, Sloane Stephens, Sofia Kenin, and Wozniacki in the main draw. Three of the tour's hot hands, No.20 Navarro, Dubai finalist Anna Kalinskaya and Miami finalist Danielle Collins, are also set to play.

Since the main-draw cut-off, the following players have withdrawn: Jelena Ostapenko, Barbora Krejcikova, Marta Kostyuk, Yuan Yue, Diane Parry, Wang Yafan and Viktorija Golubic. They have been replaced by the main-draw alternates, including Taylor Townsend, Yulia Putintseva and Alize Cornet. 

What does the draw look like?

Main draw in Charleston (WTA 5000), where Jessica Pegula, Ons Jabeur, Maria Sakkari and Daria Kasatkina are the top seeds. pic.twitter.com/aAT5HBhoOY — WTA Insider (@WTA_insider) March 30, 2024

What are the points and prize money on offer?

First round: 1 point/ $5,540 Second round: 32 points/ $6,940 Round of 16: 60 points/ $11,190 Quarterfinals: 108 points/ $22,146 Semifinals: 195 points/ $44,286 Finalist: 325 points/ $87,665 Champion: 500 points/ $142,000

How last year's clay season played out

After three months of rolling through the hard courts of Australia, the Middle East, and America, the Hologic WTA Tour kicks off the clay season next week in Charleston and the WTA 250 tournament in Bogota, Colombia. 

After a one-week break for national call-ups for Billie Jean King Cup, the tour will begin its march through the European clay. After tournaments in Stuttgart, Germany and Rouen, France, back-to-back two-week WTA 1000 events will be played in Madrid and Rome before the second Slam of the season gets underway at Roland Garros.

Here's a look back at how the 2023 clay-court season played out:

Charleston (WTA 500): Ons Jabeur d. Belinda Bencic Bogota (WTA 250): Tatjana Maria d. Peyton Stearns

Stuttgart (WTA 500): Iga Swiatek d. Aryna Sabalenka

Madrid (WTA 1000): Aryna Sabalenka d. Iga Swiatek Rome (WTA 1000): Elena Rybakina d. Anhelina Kalinina

Strasbourg (WTA 250): Elina Svitolina d. Anna Blinkova Rabat (WTA 250): Lucia Bronzetti d. Julia Grabher

Roland Garros (Grand Slam): Iga Swiatek d. Karolina Muchova

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The Kremlin Cup was first created in 1990 becoming the first international professional tennis tournament to be held in Russia. The tournament started as a men's only event during the first years of its run, before it became a joint event in 1996. Until 2007, it was held on a carpet surface. It is now held on a RuKortHard surface.

Played indoors in Russia's bustling and chilly capital of Moscow in October, the Kremlin Cup became the country's first pro international tennis tournament when it was founded in 1990. Russian players have dominated the event, winning 14 of the 19 titles, with Yevgeny Kafelnikov winning a record five consecutive titles between 1997-2001.

Olympic Stadium, known locally as the Olimpiyskiy, is a large indoor arena, located in Moscow, Russia. It was built for the 1980 Summer Olympics and hosted the basketball and boxing events. A part of the Olimpiyskiy Sports Complex, it makes up one architectural ensemble with another venue, constructed at the same time, the Swimming Pool. The venue is so large, that up to 80,000 people can occupy its space. It has hosted the Davis Cup finals and Bandy World Championships on several occasions, and is the home of the Kremlin Cup tournament. It was the world's 1st indoor bandy arena. When smaller indoor sports are held at the venue, such as tennis or basketball, only 1/4 of the floor space is used. Capacity at this configuration can vary between 10,000 and 16,000 people.

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