When Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova played for the Wimbledon title in 1984, the chair umpire, the late Georgina Clark, earned her own place in tennis history as the first woman to officiate a women’s singles final at the storied All-England Club. In the 37 years that have followed that historic event, women have become much more prominent figures in the umpire’s chair at tennis tournaments globally, and in the last two decades, an eye test confirms a further move towards full equality: Women are umpiring men’s matches much more frequently.
That said, in that time, only four women have been tasked with overseeing a men’s singles championship at a Grand Slam tournament—three of those at a single event, the US Open. After Sandra de Jenken of France officially broke the glass ceiling in 2007 by umpiring the men’s final at both the Australian and French Opens, three different women—Eva Asderaki-Moore from Greece, Alison Hughes from Great Britain and Louise Azemar Engzell from Sweden—have taken charge of a US Open men’s final: Asderaki-Moore in 2015, Hughes in 2018 and Azemar Engzell in 2020.
In a position where not getting noticed is often the goal, each nonetheless made an important impression in New York, and hope that their presence in the chair will help to open doors for more women to follow in their stead.
“What we’re trying to do is to inspire other women to get involved in tennis, get involved in officiating, because if we don’t have many women who start, then we don’t have them later on,” Asderaki-Moore says. “We want to help empower other female officials around the world … to show them that we’re there for them, that we want to listen to their issues and that we’re there to help them in any way that we can.”
Different though their origins may be, these women share much that helped earn them their own places in tennis history. Long before they became quiet stalwarts of the game, they all picked up the sport much closer to home and were eventually introduced to officiating as teenagers.
They progressed through their early international certifications at organized ITF schools in six different European countries—encapsulating the sport’s global nature—while earning both officiating experience at tournaments and university degrees.
“Once I got started, I just kept going, and a moment came where there was nothing else that I wanted to do,” said Asderaki-Moore, who was a nationally-ranked junior player in Greece, and later became the first woman from her country to attain elite international officiating certification. “I was 16 years old when I was a line umpire for the first time at my tennis club in Chalkida. They asked us as players to help out and I thought, ‘Why not?’. Three years later, when I went for my white badge in 2000 in Luxembourg, that was the first time that I’d ever even traveled overseas. Starting back then, I never thought I would be the official that I am today.”
“Tennis was a hot subject in Sweden when we had our great era of players, so I played quite a lot as a child,” said Azemar Engzell, who hails from Sollentuna, north of the Swedish capital of Stockholm. “But the local club where I was playing didn’t really have a lot of girls, so I played with some boys. One of them, his mother was a line umpire, and we had the first level of umpire courses at our club.
“I was 15 when I called lines for the first time in qualifying at an ATP Challenger. In 1996, when I was 16, I started calling lines at our tour events in Bastad and Stockholm. But to one day work Wimbledon, or to one day do a Grand Slam final — that was never something I thought would actually happen.”
“My first on-court experience was at a local club tournament … as the only line umpire. I was so nervous,” recalls Hughes, who was born in Scotland, raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, and began officiating in 1992 after spells as a junior player and working at a tennis club and in schools as a coach.
“I remember my dad driving me there … and I think I came off court and I said, ‘I don’t want to do that again!’ Obviously, I got over that pretty quickly.”
Over the years, the trio have developed into three of the most recognizable faces in the umpire’s chair: Hughes was the first of the three to be promoted to gold badge status—the highest certification level in international tennis officiating on a scale that builds from white, bronze, and silver—at the end of 2003. Asderaki-Moore and Azemar Engzell followed at the end of 2007 and 2008, respectively.
“What we’re trying to do is to inspire other women to get involved in tennis, get involved in officiating, because if we don’t have many women who start, then we don’t have them later on." - Eva Asderaki-Moore
To date, they have built a decorated on-court portfolio of nearly three dozen Grand Slam singles finals between them; selections to five Summer Olympics; and appointments to officiate at both the Billie Jean King Cup (formerly Fed Cup) and Davis Cup Finals. As three of 10 women from 10 different nations currently working as gold badge chairs umpires on tour, they have seen the progress in their profession first-hand—due, in no small part, to their own longevity.
“You can see that there are more women umpires, more women doing men’s matches, more women doing men’s matches on big courts in later rounds of tournaments,” Asderaki-Moore said. “Even now on the ATP, there is a woman [Aurélie Tourte from France] on their team of officials. A few years ago, that was inconceivable, but now it’s happening.”
But there is still much more work to be done: according to ITF data, just over 20 percent of internationally-certified officials worldwide are women. To help attract a new generation to the profession and retain them, all three of these accomplished officials play a role in the mentoring and performance evaluation of promising colleagues every year. Both Azemar Engzell and Hughes have also attained gold badge status as chief umpires, which affords them the opportunity to lead officiating teams at tournaments in an off-court capacity.
“When I first started, there were a lot of people, British officials and others, who took me under their wing… so I try to give back as much to officiating that I received,” said Hughes, who has six women’s singles finals at Wimbledon among the highlights on her résumé.
“When I started, there were women involved and women at the top level, but there’s definitely been more who’ve come through, even in the last four or five years, and more doing more high-profile matches. We have a great group of young women right now, and hopefully, we can just keep expanding on that.”
“For women officials or women who want to become officials, I think tennis has come very far in comparison to many other sports, but it can, of course, be better,” Azemar Engzell added. “Whatever we can do to help younger officials, I think we have to do. It’s one of the most important parts of our job.”
In recent years, some of the advice and guidance they’ve offered has extended beyond the rules of tennis. While at the top of the profession, Azemar Engzell and Asderaki-Moore each have had two children, making them a part of a small circle of mothers within the game’s best chair umpires, and a valuable resource for colleagues also considering starting a family.
“I always had in my head that I wanted to have a family … but at the time I had kids, we didn’t have any other female chair umpires who had them. Now, we have three moms working full-time,” said Azemar Engzell, who has an 8-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter.
“I had good support from my bosses, who let me organize my schedule the way that I wanted, which allowed me to feel it out and to decide what I wanted to do. In the beginning, it was not easy. When I’m at the job, when I’m there on-court, I have to almost shut the family part out of my mind. It all takes such a big part of you, and I think that was my biggest struggle.
"After my second [child], I wasn’t sure if I was going to come back, and I was open about that. I hadn’t worked really that much after the [2015] Fed Cup Finals in November, and my daughter was around six months old when I went to back to New York for the US Open the next August. I worked there for two weeks… and I just remember saying, ‘I love it.’ I said at the time that coming back after being away from tennis for a period like this makes you realize how much you love it and what it gives to you.”
“To be honest, before I had kids, I was always thinking, ‘I can’t do this. Once I have a family, I’m going to stop.’ And then I had a family and I didn’t want to stop,” added Asderaki-Moore, whose two sons are 2 1/2 years, and 15 months old. “My husband was also very supportive in that he said, ‘You really like what you do, so don’t stop. We’ll find a way to make it work,’ and we do … but it’s inevitable that you miss things.
"When I was at the US Open last year, for example, I missed when my second son started crawling. I woke up in the morning one day to a video on my phone. It’s part of the package, but what I say to other women who come to me and ask me about it is, the flip side is when I’m not at a tournament, I don’t have to go to an office. I have the best of both parts. I get to go do my job, which I love doing, and I get to be a full-time mom at home, which I also love doing.”
“I was just in Australia for five-and-a-half weeks, which was by far the longest period that I’ve been away at once,” Azemar Engzell continued. “I understand the people who say, ’How do you go and leave?’, but when I see it compared to other parents I know… I see the privilege of what I have. I can do what I love to do, and have all the time I have with my kids when I’m at home. I see the positives of what all of this has given me.”
With nearly two decades of experience and thousands of matches behind them, it’s apparent that tennis has given all three more than just a professional vocation, and they all say that they plan to stick with the sport for as long as life lets them.
“Life takes you on an adventure sometimes. My mindset when I first entered officiating was just to enjoy it, to go out and to be involved in tennis in a different way. My goal was to be working on the lines at Wimbledon. I never thought it would be my full-time career, and I never thought I'd still be involved 20, 25, 30 years after I first started,” Hughes said.
“I look back on the years, and I've gotten some really, really good memories and good friends throughout the whole time, and that is something that makes you want to keep going, as well as the challenge of stepping on court. I can't see myself walking away any time soon. Tennis has been has been part of my life for so long and, hopefully, it will continue to be part of my life for long in the future.”
