The draws for the 2023 US Open Wheelchair Championships presented by Deloitte were released in full on Sunday ahead of Tuesday's start of competition.
The No. 1 seeds in each draw—Diede de Groot, Tokito Oda and Niels Vink—arrive in New York as the consensus world No. 1s in their respective rankings, and a host of challengers will hope to unseat them in their hopes for a US Open title.
Notably, this year's event seeds 16 quad players accepted for the first time, bringing the division in line with the men's and women's open singles divisions which were expanded to 16 players last year. Vink, who beat compatriot Sam Schroder for last year's quad singles title, opens his defense against Chile's Francisco Cayulef, one of the three players whom Vink estimated that he'd never faced before the draw was made.
But one extra match in both singles and doubles, nor the possibility of playing an unfamiliar opponent in the expanded field, wasn't something that was weighing heavily on the 20-year-old's mind ahead of Sunday's draw ceremony.
"If you want to win the tournament, you have to beat them all, so I'm just going to take it one match at a time," Vink said with a smile.
"The bounce [on these courts] is very high, and I like to play heavy, so the [US Open] court is good for my game style."
In the men's division, 17-year-old Oda is in the hunt for his third straight Grand Slam title after winning at both Roland Garros and Wimbledon, while de Groot comes to New York having won the last 11 Grand Slam titles.
Should she win another in New York, the Dutchwoman will have won the calendar-year Grand Slam for the third year in a row.
Her tournament begins against France's Pauline Deroulede, while Oda faces France's Stephane Houdet in a first-round match that will see a 35-year age difference between the two competitors.
Houdet, the 2013 and 2017 singles champion, is 52 years old. The pair played earlier this year, and Oda won in straight sets, 6-3, 6-4.
American hopes will rest on the quintet of Dana Mathewson, Casey Ratzlaff, Conner Stroud, Andrew Bogdanov and David Wagner. While Mathewson, Ratzlaff and Wagner are no strangers to the US Open, Bogdanov and Stroud set to make their Grand Slam debuts in the quad and men's draws, respectively, against No. 3 seed Donald Ramphadi of South Africa and Japan's Takuya Miki.
Wheelchair competition at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center begins Tuesday with first-round singles play, and doubles play begins Wednesday.
