Kristie Ahn wins US Open Wild Card Challenge

Eleven years after making her first and only US Open main-draw singles appearance, Kristie Ahn will be back in the New York main event this month.

The 27-year-old New Jersey native and three-time All-American at Stanford clinched her spot by winning the US Open Wild Card Challenge. Her quarterfinal run as a qualifier at the Mubadala Silicon Valley Classic, a WTA Premier event in San Jose, Calif., last week was good enough on its own to outpace her fellow wild-card hopefuls.

The former Cardinal clinched first place with Francesca Di Lorenzo's loss to Kiki Bertens in a second-round match at Rogers Cup in Toronto.

Ahn, from Upper Saddle River, N.J., is currently ranked No. 138 on the WTA Tour, with a career high of No. 105 in January 2018.  The 2019 US open will be her third career Grand Slam main-draw singles appearance; in addition to qualifying for the 2008 US Open as a 16-year-old amateur, she also competed in the 2018 Australian Open after winning the USTA’s wild card challenge for that event. 

After declining to collect her 2008 first-round prize money to preserve her amateur status, Ahn went on to star at Stanford, clinching the Cardinal's NCAA team championship in 2013 before graduating in 2014.

Ernesto Escobedo still leads the men's side of the challenge, though the wild card could still go to a number of contenders playing in the USTA Pro Circuit ATP Challenger 90 event in Aptos, Calif., this week, or Tommy Paul, who qualified and reached the second round at the men's Rogers Cup, an ATP Masters 1000 event in Montreal.

The challenge measures ranking points earned at hard-court tournaments over a five-week summer period to award a US Open singles main-draw wild card to an American man and woman who didn't otherwise earn direct entry.  For more information, visit the USTA’s US Open Wild Card Challenge homepage.