FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — The French wild card who roared into the semifinals of her home Grand Slam, one year on from a serious knee injury that ruled her out of the French Open one week before it started.
The Canadian wild card who rolled through her home WTA 1000 on debut, beating four Grand Slam champions to complete her rise from the 300s to the top 30 of the women’s tennis rankings.
Loïs Boisson and Victoria Mboko’s rises have all the hallmarks of a tennis fairytale, the sudden thrust into stardom that constitutes the Cinderella story, one of the most enduring archetypes in sports. There’s just one problem: it’s not the real story. The real story is far from the bright lights and big stadiums of the four Grand Slams and the 1,000-level tournaments one rung below them.
The ITF World Tennis Tour is the lowest tier of professional tennis, two below the WTA Tour. Its tournaments offer little prize money in ranking points, and are dotted all across the globe. For some players, it is their entire tennis existence. For others, it is a place for developing a winning habit that becomes a springboard to the upper echelons of the sport.
Prior to Boisson’s Paris run, she was 14-4 in ITF matches in 2025. Prior to Mboko’s triumph in Montreal, she was 25-1, including a 22-win streak. Belinda Bencic, who returned to the WTA Tour in January after giving birth to her first child and has risen from world No. 421 to world No. 19, started that return with two ITF events.
Mboko and Boisson are out of the U.S. Open, but a winning machine who looks like a star emerging fully formed remains. Janice Tjen, a 23-year-old from Indonesia who until last year played college tennis at Pepperdine University, just north of Los Angeles, came through qualifying before beating No. 24 seed Veronika Kudermetova in the first round. It was her first main-draw Grand Slam match, and she defeated one of the 25 best players in the world. The start of a fairytale? Or the culmination of 100 wins in 113 matches on the ITF World Tennis Tour, including streaks of 20, 16 and 27 matches and, in one stint, 42 sets?
“My coach and I always talk about if it is a first round, if it’s an ITF, if it’s a final, we’re going to try to approach it as if it was just another match,” Tjen said in an interview Sunday. “And I think that has helped me with handling the nerves.” That coach, Chris Bint, said in an interview the following day: “We use the phrase, ‘The ball doesn’t care.’ The ball doesn’t care who’s down the other end. It’s still a tennis court, with the same dimensions.”
Down the other end in the second round will be Emma Raducanu, the fairytale of fairytales in professional tennis the past 25 years. Raducanu became the first qualifier to win a Grand Slam at this tournament four years ago, not dropping a set on her run to the most improbable of titles. “She started university and graduated two weeks later,” as one British tennis executive said.
Tjen’s journey, and those of Mboko and Boisson, as well as Czech player Tereza Valentová who plays 2022 Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina, have been more like going on work experience at a smaller firm and then applying the knowledge acquired at a big company. Unranked last May, Tjen qualified for and won the lowest-level ITF event in Monastir, Tunisia to get her foot on the ladder. There are no professional women’s events in Indonesia; she has traveled during her time at Pepperdine and beyond to move up the rankings.
She met Bint by chance at the end of last year, when she was New Zealand for a couple of tournaments. Originally from England, he was the national tennis performance coach for the country, where he coached Vivian Yang, a fellow Pepperdine alumna and a friend of Tjen’s.
Bint was taken by Tjen’s game and willingness to learn, and took a couple of weeks holiday to travel with her to a pair of events in South Korea in April and May. Tjen won one of them and reached the final in the other, and Bint became convinced she had something special. He quit his job with New Zealand tennis and started coaching her full time.
That something special largely comes from a heavy, spitting topspin forehand that dovetails with an aggressive backhand slice — the result of Tjen growing up idolizing three-time Grand Slam champion Ash Barty. Clips of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz feature in their training sessions, Bint said, as Tjen learns to use that forehand to dominate from all parts of the court.
Bint is focused on improving the accuracy of her serve, and helping Tjen to lean on her prowess at the net. She knifed away a backhand volley on match point against Kudermetova, set up by two of those punishing forehands. Brad Gilbert, the former coach of Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and Coco Gauff who is a Pepperdine alumnus and remains close to its college setup, thought she would be a doubles player — perhaps even a Grand Slam champion in the discipline.
In a phone interview during the opening days of the U.S. Open, Gilbert recalled the college chant that accompanied Tjen’s victories for Pepperdine — “What time is it? It’s JT time!” — while explaining the logic that underpins these accelerations to the big time. Winning, is winning, is winning, no matter the level and no matter the opponent.
“You come up here and you have wins under your belt, you feel like you can win at this level,” he said. Former world No. 1 and Tennis Channel analyst at the U.S. Open Jim Courier said in an interview Sunday: “At any level, when you compile that type of a run, that’s going to imbue you with confidence.” He was talking about Mboko, but he could have been talking about Boisson or Tjen.
Tjen cited the experience of constantly having to close out matches as one of the transferable benefits of her ITF odyssey, which Mboko and Boisson echoed during interviews at the tournament. They, as well as Iva Jović, the 17-year-old American with a similarly enviable record at the ITF and WTA 125 (the second rung) levels, added that the depth of women’s tennis is such that the jump to WTA Tour events isn’t as stark as it might appear. “A lot of the girls come from those and immediately have good stuff on the WTA Tour, so I think it’s great, honestly. I love the ITFs,” Jović said.
“I think it’s just match counts. You have a lot more matches in those tournaments, and you just really have to grind, because if you want to get here, you have to win at that level. You can’t just win a round and then lose. You have to really clean up and win those tournaments. So just teaching you that discipline of every day you have to show up, and you have to take care of business is big.”
Still, moving up necessitates some evolution. Bint has put more focus on nutrition and sleep as Tjen has risen up the ranks, adding a fitness trainer from Pepperdine to the team. There’s also a physio from Indonesia. Overall, the vibe remains the same: lots of Monopoly Deal, which has generally replaced Uno as the locker room game of choice, and Mario Kart. Yoshi, the rapid green dinosaur, is Tjen’s character of choice. Tjen’s parents, who are big tennis fans, will be watching back home in Jakarta. They’d have loved to travel to New York to see their daughter but Tjen’s grandma has been unwell so they’ve stayed put.
For Tjen, moving up also means becoming comfortable in new situations, not just on the court. Unused to having to speak after a match, Tjen had to be directed to the lectern for her news conference after beating Kudermetova; as the first Indonesian player to win a Grand Slam match since 2004, when Angelique Widjaja won in New York, she has the added attention and pressure that comes from representing a country less visible on the tennis map. She got to know Alex Eala, the 20-year-old who has been making tennis history for the Philippines the past few months, when they were both growing up.
Tjen, who first studied in Oregon, made the transfer to Pepperdine in June 2021. A couple of months later, she was nursing an injury, which meant she had plenty of time to watch that year’s U.S. Open. Raducanu’s stunning run there “inspired not just me, but a lot of players that we can do that too,” she said.
And even Raducanu’s Cinderella story is not quite to script. The Covid-19 pandemic meant that she played just six matches in 2020, before bursting onto the scene in 2021. But in 2018 and 2019 she played 50 matches on the tour that taught Tjen, Mboko and Boisson to win, win, and win some more.
She won 40 of them.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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