By Mike McIntyre
Canada has a new No. 1 female tennis player in Françoise Abanda. The 21 year old supplants a fellow Montrealer in Genie Bouchard who had previously held the position since 2013. Abanda's ranking currently sits at No. 128 on the WTA Tour, which is 17 spots below her career-high that she established back in the Fall of 2017.
The fact that Genie Bouchard has lost her lengthy hold on the top position in the Canadian rankings should come as no surprise after her compounding struggles on the court. Abanda's name has been in the mix in recent months as someone we expected might take over the No. 1 position yet she is not nearly as well known to casual tennis fans in Canada.
The young talent is now into her fifth year of playing main draw WTA events and has seen her ranking fluctuate within the top-200 in the world since September of 2016. Her career win-loss record stands at the moment at a modest 139-103 but she has shown signs of having the potential to break into the top 100 with some encouraging wins and gutsy performances over the years.
Last summer Abanda took French Open champ Jelena Ostapenko to the brink of defeat at Wimbledon before falling by a score of 4-6, 7-6(4), 6-3 in the second round. It would have marked Abanda's first time making the final 32 of a Grand Slam event.
At the international level, Abanda's best result for Tennis Canada came in 2017 when she defeated the 51st ranked Yaroslava Shvedova and 31st ranked Yulia Putintseva to help her country maintain a position in the World Group II section of the Fed Cup.
2018 has been an up and down season so far for the young Canadian as she failed to qualify for the first major of the year in Australia before hovering at the .500 level on American hardcourts through until the end of February. In March Abanda could not find her way into the main draw of either Indian Wells or Miami and then encountered a couple of more hiccups before making the quarterfinals of an ITF event in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida. Abanda was slated to open Canada's Fed Cup tie in singles against Ukraine last month in her home town of Montreal but had a freak accident during warm-up where she tumbled and suffered a neck injury and had to withdraw and watch from the sidelines as her country advanced in the upset.
There still remains plenty of time for Abanda to achieve similar success on the WTA Tour as she did during her junior career. At the peak moment of her junior days Abanda reached a high of No. 4 in the rankings and made the semifinals of Wimbledon in 2012 in both junior singles and doubles. She also made the singles semi at the junior French Open in 2014 proving her comfort level on clay as well.
Growing up admiring the Williams sisters, Abanda seems like she could be a marketing dream for tennis in Canada. She projects a down-to-earth personality off the court and a fiercely competitive one on it. Her Instagram account also reveals someone who has interests in fashion and is comfortable in front of a camera but not at a distracting level from her day job.
Hopefully Abanda will receive the same level of support and promotion from Tennis Canada as they put behind Genie Bouchard for many years while she was Canada's top female player. Though Abanda takes a more quiet approach on social media, she does have a semi-active Twitter account and proudly tweeted on Monday about her new ranking achievement in Canada. Canadian tennis fans will undoubtedly be proudly following their new No. 1 as she continues to push forward in her developing professional tennis career.
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