As more and more players withdrew from the United States Open due to travel and safety concerns during the coronavirus pandemic, a seat has finally opened up for a player who took the sport accidentally and hasn’t let go since.
Katrina Scott, 16, received a wild card 18 days after the initial wild card list was announced, and her next game is Thursday against American teenager, 22-seeded Amanda Anisimova, 19.
Scott showed a willingness to compete in his first round match on Tuesday which belied the hasty call-up. In 637th place in the women’s singles, Scott beat 131st-place Natalia Vikhlyantseva of Russia, 7-6 (3), 6-2.
Katrina’s mother, Lena Scott, had grown up as a dancer in Iran before emigrating to the United States at the age of 17 with her mother, who was seeking treatment for breast cancer.
Lena Scott had initially started her daughter taking ballet lessons at just 18 months. When Katrina didn’t start dancing, he instead put her into figure skating, which she thought was pretty close to ballet, at the age of 3.
Katrina started skating fast, training up to three hours a day towards the goal of a day of professional competition. But when Lena couldn’t pick her up from training one day, Katrina’s alternate ride took her life in a new direction: the friend she’d driven with first had to go to a tennis lesson. When Scott took to the pitch, her ambitions suddenly changed.
“Once I want something, I work as hard as possible to get it and do everything I can to get it,” Scott said in an interview. “Anything in life, I’m super competitive in all aspects of life. Even off the pitch, I always want to win. “
Her father, David Scott, said the family began taking Katrina’s tennis more seriously when she started doing well in 14-year-old competitions.
“She’s having fun, she’s having fun, and she got more serious when she became part of her identity, which is really good at it and can really take her somewhere,” said David Scott. “And it worked. She continued, she stayed motivated, she became more serious and more aware of her time on the pitch and how she used it. “
Katrina Scott’s goals were validated last summer in San Jose, California when she played a competitive first-round qualifier match against Timea Babos, who is currently in 101st place, and was immediately greeted by the crowd.
“All the fans were cheering as loud as they could and I had them behind me,” he said. “It was this feeling, this adrenaline rush. I was like: this is really for me. “
Months later, his path took an unexpected geographical detour. Scott’s parents met as students at Santa Monica College and then Cal State-Northridge in Los Angeles, where they would later raise their daughter, who is bilingual in English and Farsi. But she moved to Columbus, Ohio to train with coach David Kass at the Kass Tennis Academy.
Kass encouraged the family to withdraw her from competitions for six months to retrain her game, a plan that went on for nine months due to the pandemic. Kass and Scott used the time to rebuild his mentality on the pitch and his right.
“She had been more of a defensive player in the juniors, and in our opinion that had to change to be very successful on the pro tour,” said Kass. “This is an important change, in terms of ball attack and pitch positioning.”
“His forehand restarted with a completely different swing,” he added. “Learning a new swing isn’t the hardest thing to do over time, but unlearning a swing you’ve been doing for years is extremely difficult.”
More than those tactical and technical changes, Kass was very impressed with Scott’s mentality in his first round victory, triumphing despite having “a lot of anxiety” in the match.
“I’m really proud of her for fighting through it,” Kass said. “She certainly played with a good deal of nerve, which is understandable, but she was able to find a way, not playing her best tennis or even close to it. But it is a great competitor. “
The win solidified Scott’s place in a highly regarded cohort of American girls born in 2004, including Coco Gauff and Robin Montgomery.
“When one of your junior peers breaks through, I think it’s been shown that the others start pushing and believing too,” Kass said. “You start seeing them in groups.”
Like Gauff and many other young players, Scott used this summer to highlight civil rights causes near her, wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt on the pitch for her game and during her press conference.
Scott, whose paternal grandmother is African American, was proud of other players, including Naomi Osaka, for choosing to use their platforms to highlight social issues.
“I think it’s great that we’re really putting this out there and letting people know and let people know that we’re not too young,” Scott said. “We are young, but we will do our best for our cause and support it 100 percent, and we will do what we can to make a difference.”
For Lena Scott, who accompanied her daughter to New York as her father watched from their home in Los Angeles, the moment of victory at the Open made sense of her daughter’s sacrifices.
“All of her hard work is paying off – it’s worth it,” said Lena Scott. “Seeing her happy, enjoying being out there, that makes me happy, whether she won or lost.”
