Australian wildcard Taylah Preston has recorded an incredible opening-round qualifying victory in her first Grand Slam appearance.<\/p>\n
Being the youngest player in this year’s Australian Open qualifying draw has not hindered Perth teen Taylah Preston as she made a stunning Grand Slam debut, beating former world No.32 Kurumi Nara in the opening round of the Australian Open 2022 qualifying competition on Tuesday 11 January.<\/p>\n
Currently ranked No. 1184 and contesting only her fourth professional tournament, the 16-year-old wildcard produced a fearless display at Melbourne Park, securing the win against the more experience world No. 189 in just 91 minutes.<\/p>\n
Preston overpowered her 30-year-old Japanese opponent, striking 27 winners in an impressive 7-5, 6-4 victory.<\/p>\n
It continues a breakout summer for Preston, who was named Female Junior Athlete of the Year at the 2021 Australian Tennis Awards. Last week she beat former world No. 5 Sara Errani in Melbourne Summer Set qualifying.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s always been a dream to play in the Australian Open and even though it\u2019s qualifying, it\u2019s still playing in the tournament,\u201d Preston told The West Australian<\/em> last month.<\/p>\n \u201cTaylah has fantastic qualities of competitiveness and spirit on the court and we\u2019ve always focused on being humble and a good person off the court as well. Those traits and her attitude are a big part of why she is such a great tennis player,\u201d said Brad Dyer, Preston’s coach of eight years.<\/p>\n The Australian Open 2022 qualifying competition continues across Melbourne Park this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Australian wildcard Taylah Preston has recorded an incredible opening-round qualifying victory in her first Grand Slam appearance. Being the youngest player in this year’s Australian Open qualifying draw has not hindered Perth teen Taylah Preston as she made a stunning Grand Slam debut, beating former world No.32 Kurumi Nara in the opening round of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6328,"featured_media":17156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6328"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennis.com.au\/wa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}