Sometimes it starts with a sigh: Some tournaments start with a frown when you look at the draw and the name of the Wimbledon winner is there as the opening opponent. Jule Niemeier, 23, from Dortmund has to duel in the first round of the high-class Stuttgart Tennis Grand Prix this week with Jelena Rybakina from Kazakhstan, who triumphed in 2022 at the All England Club and just won the Indian Wells final. Of course, it could have been a few degrees more precarious, for example with a tournament opener against Iga Swiatek from Poland, number one in the world. Jule Niemeier has already experienced that: in January, in the first round of the Australian Open.
It cannot be said that it was a lucky fairy in tennis who cleared the way for Jule Niemeier in the white-robed realm of the professionals, on the contrary: she got through alone with powerful forehand strokes, cleverness and verve. She has arrived at position 65 in the ranking; and who knows, said Rainer Schüttler, captain of the women’s tennis team in the DTB association, recently, where Jule Niemeier would have been if she had been credited with world ranking points for reaching the Wimbledon quarter-finals last year. The WTA tour had stopped that at the time because the English had locked out the Russian and Belarusian athletes at the most important lawn tournament because of the Ukraine attack.
Jule Niemeier also learned how to deal with sporting setbacks. Perhaps the most impressive proof came last Saturday at the Billie Jean King Cup in Stuttgart, when she gave the national team a 1-1 lead in a duel against Brazil. She was nervous like she hadn’t for a long time, she confessed afterwards: Because she not only played against the big favorite, Beatriz Haddad Maia, number 14 in the world, but also against her own negative balance: Since the beginning of the year, Niemeier was entitled to two wins in 13 matches Beech, the list of your first-round defeats was long. In Stuttgart she managed a three-set double success with force: against Haddad Maia – and against herself: “I can’t say whether that’s the turning point,” she explained when the DTB team had won the national duel, “but if I play like today, it’s okay.”
She got into the little downward spiral in January when she had to compete against four professionals from the top 30 in succession and lost each time. She received encouragement from her coach Christopher Kas, from the DFB women’s boss Barbara Rittner, who has been convinced of Niemeier’s abilities for years (“She’s a number on sand!”), and from team captain Schüttler, who advised patience: A tennis match will be sometimes only decided by three or four points: “If you lack confidence, sometimes a risky ball just flies past, with confidence it lands on the line.” Sometimes in rows.
The competition in Stuttgart is considerable
In any case, Schüttler is an advocate of continuous career planning for young professional players after high school: “You used to have to be very good at the age of 18 or 20, but that’s not the case anymore,” he says. “Now you can still play top-class tennis at 35.” Niemeier’s teammate Tatjana Maria, mother of two and winner of the tournament in Bogotá, is the best proof: “Development takes time.”
At the Grand Prix in Stuttgart, Jule Niemeier and Tatjana Maria, twelve years older than him, number 71 in the rankings, are the best Germans, but the organizers invited them to play in the main field with a wild card, because the competition is considerable: eight of the world’s ten best tennis players are eight serve, alongside defending champion Swiatek, Australian Open winner Aryna Sabalenka, Wimbledon finalist Ons Jabeur and US top player Coco Gauff.
Incidentally, the tournament did not start with a sigh for everyone: Tatjana Maria was drawn to a qualifier, the Swiss Ylena In-Albon.
