On a scorching hot day, in the middle of the blazing sun, the stands at court 14 at Roland-Garros are quite full. The atmosphere is good, people are looking forward to it. A Philippine flag can be seen here and there. A flag that you don’t often see in the tennis world. Philippine tennis success is almost never there.
Until Alexandra Eala came on the scene, one of the young players who will perform in Paris this morning. In March of last year she made her breakthrough on the WTA tour at the Miami Masters tournament. Because her ranking was not yet high enough to participate, she received a wild card from the organization, and then, to everyone’s surprise, made it to the last four. On her way to the semi-finals, she defeated three Grand Slam winners: Madison Keys, Jelena Ostapenko and Iga Swiatek. She eventually lost to American top ten player Jessica Pegula in three sets.
The tennis craze surrounding the 21-year-old Filipino broke out during that tournament, the stadiums were full of fans who came to support their compatriot.
“I remember standing in front of you on Center Court in Miami, my home tournament,” Pegula told Eala on the tennis podcast The Player’s Box earlier this year, “and wondering: why is no one cheering for me?”
Hardly a tennis tradition
The success in Miami brought Eala into the top hundred of the WTA, the first ever Filipino. There are also few compatriots to enjoy outside the top hundred: the Philippine Tennis Federation’s website lists only ten players, men and women. There is no woman from the country outside of Eala with a WTA ranking, and the highest-ranked man in the ATP rankings is not in the top 1,000.
Hence the enormous attention for Eala. Wherever she plays, fans flock to her matches. In Australia, where many Filipinos live, they even stood in line – some were already waiting in the stands two games before Eala took office. Her press conferences during the Australian Open were viewed more times on YouTube than Alcaraz, Sinner and Medvedev combined.
The stadium in Dubai was also full at every round. “We could hear the cheers of all her supporters from our hotel,” Pegula recalled in The Player’s Box.
The Philippines hardly has a tennis tradition. Eala and her older brother learned about the sport through their grandfather. Her brother, who eventually went on to play tennis for a university in the United States, tried several different sports before settling on tennis. Eala herself immediately started playing tennis at the age of four, and did nothing else. “I was actually very bad at every other sport,” she says laughing in her press conference after her lost match against Jovic. “I often say that I don’t really understand how I became a professional athlete.”
I was actually really bad at every other sport
Tennis suited her. For the first few years she was coached by her grandfather. He had no formal training, but got his information from books and magazines, and found inspiration from players like Pete Sampras. “When I was twelve, my technique was quite wobbly,” she said in Served, a tennis podcast by former player Andy Roddick. “But my grandfather instilled in me my fighting spirit and taught me to work hard.”
There weren’t many tennis courts around, and the court Eala had to practice on doubled as a basketball court. That has contributed to the aggressive playing style she is known for. “I had to stay close to the baseline,” she explained in The Player’s Box. “If I stood too far behind it, I kept running into the basket.”
Her parents wanted to support her tennis dream. Sports were important to the family: Eala’s mother won a bronze swimming medal in 1985 at the Southeast Asian Games, a sporting event held every two years. Both parents are now businessmen.
Their support was desperately needed, because in order to participate in youth tournaments, she had to travel a lot. After all, the Philippines does not have any high-level youth tournaments.
Eala was successful. At the age of twelve she won the prestigious Les Petits A, for players up to fourteen years old. This really started her international tennis career. She was discovered by the Rafa Nadal Academy, who invited her to train there in Mallorca. For that she had to move to the other side of the world. Did she have to think about that for a long time? “I immediately thought: let’s go!” she told Roddick. “I was quite used to traveling for my age, and my brother came with me, my parents also came to visit me regularly, so I wasn’t completely alone.”
Training at 22-time Grand Slam winner Rafael Nadal’s academy paid off and she continued to achieve success at youth tournaments around the world, from South Africa to Japan and in the United States. In 2022, Eala won the US Open for juniors at the age of seventeen, becoming the first Filipino ever. In 2023 she had entered the top two hundred, and then continued to rise steadily.
Aggressive play
Until 2025, when the increase was much slower. Up until that point, Eala had already received a wildcard several times for Miami and another Masters tournament in Madrid, but had not had much success with that. But during that tournament she surprised everyone with her aggressive play. And although she has not yet been able to repeat her stunt in Miami for the rest of the season, she is now a regular at the tournaments and is firmly in the top fifty, with a provisional record of 29th. At the end of 2025, she won a gold medal for the first time at the Southeast Asian Games, where her mother had also been successful.
The success is big enough to make her a Filipino celebrity. “We are a proud people,” she says in Roddick’s podcast. “Like Manny Pacquiao [een succesvolle Filippijnse bokser] played a match, it was almost a national holiday. Viewing parties were organized, crime rates went down.”
The WTA has also seen the popularity of Eala, and how her success is appealing to a new audience. At the beginning of this year, a WTA tournament was organized for the first time in the Philippine capital Manila. Even before Eala had confirmed that she would come, the final was sold out. By the way, she did not reach the final: she did not get further than the quarter-finals.
Alexandra Eala during her lost match against Iva Jovic.
AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard
In Paris this year it was the first round. Iva Jovic, number 19 in the world, was still too strong for Eala, who eventually lost 6-4, 6-2. But the standing ovation she received and the big applause that sounded when she left the track show that it does not matter much to the Filipino fans that their compatriot is not yet a contender for major prizes. She has already made it further than they ever dreamed.
