With their professional peers competing at the Paralympics during this US Open fortnight, the next generation of wheelchair tennis champions will take center stage in the 2024 US Open Junior Wheelchair Championships presented by Deloitte.
Eight boys and eight girls from all over the world will compete in singles and doubles events at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center beginning on Wednesday in the hopes of adding to the fledging history of wheelchair tennis for juniors at Grand Slam level. In 2022, the US Open debuted its junior tournament, a first for the four Grand Slams.
View full junior singles draws: Boys | Girls
Three Americans will be competing in this year's competition hoping to be the first American to win the singles title (Maylee Phelps, who qualified for her first Paralympics this year, won the last two doubles titles): Charlie Cooper, Sabina Czauz and Tomas Majetic. The trio, with Maximus Wong, won the junior World Team Cup title in April, the wheelchair equivalent of Billie Jean King Cup and Davis Cup, and also features men’s, women’s and quad competition. The group went perfect in round-robin play, defeating Australia, Great Britain and the Netherlands before defeating Brazil in the semifinals and Australia once more in the final to put the trophy back in American hands. The U.S. was last victorious in the competition in 2017, in a year that marked the last of three consecutive titles from 2015-17.
All three are unseeded. In the quarterfinals, Czauz will face No. 2 seed Yuma Takamuro, while Majetic will face Ivar van Rijt, also seeded No. 2. In the top half of the boys' draw, Cooper will face Ruben Harris.
"Winning the US Open juniors, that's always been a goal. That's something I set for myself earlier this year, two major events, the US Open and the World Team Cup," Cooper, who has competed in all three editions of the junior US Open, said. "We got to win the World Team Cup in Turkey, we all won as a team, and to be able to do that same success here would be awsome."
The top seeds in each draw are world No. 2 Maximilian Taucher of Austria, the 16-year-old reigning Roland Garros winner, and Vitoria Miranda of Brazil, 17 and the current world No. 1.
