EXCLUSIVE Meet three of Britain's teenage tennis stars juggling school and stardom in race for Grand Slam glory

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

It is Thursday, June 5, and Mika Stojsavljevic, 16, is cracking the books for her GCSEs in Loughborough. Hannah Klugman, 16, is in Paris, coming from a set down to reach the quarter-finals of the French Open juniors. Mimi Xu, 17, the day after her second of two huge wins in Birmingham, is sitting an A Level biology exam in her tennis kit.
A day in the complex lives of the three most promising juniors in British tennis since Jack Draper and Emma Raducanu. A day which reflects the shifting sands upon which they tread: between childhood and adulthood; junior and professional; schoolroom and tennis court.
Another date, one of the most significant of their lives: Wednesday, June 18, when all three were awarded wildcards to make their debut in the main draw of Wimbledon. In the coming days, one or more of them could go from obscurity to national recognition.
On the coaching grapevine there have been whispers for years of a golden group emerging. It is a post-Raducanu generation: highly intelligent as well as highly talented and, thanks to New York 2021, imbued with a belief that Grand Slam titles are possible.
Before the 2024 US Open, there had been three female British Grand Slam junior finalists in 40 years - there have now been two in the last three events. First Stojsavljevic won the US Open, then Klugman reached the final of the French Open. Xu, a year older, was reckoned to be a step behind but this month recorded three wins over women ranked in the top 150.
To chart the stories of these three remarkable young women, Mail Sport spoke to their formative coaches - the people who discovered and nurtured their talents.
Hannah Klugman
Alison Taylor is tennis royalty, the wife of three-time Wimbledon semi-finalist Roger Taylor and a coach of 35 years.
Taylor was working with a local girl named Alice Klugman when she noticed the talent of her younger sister. 'You could just see the love of the game, her athleticism, her focus, her concentration, her love to compete,' Taylor tells Mail Sport at the All England Club, where she is a member.
Klugman was a highly talented hockey player as well, and for a time it was a toss up which she would pursue as a career. When the Covid pandemic struck, tennis was the first sport to reopen and that was that.
'She would thrive under match conditions,' says Taylor. 'A very mature competitor. She just knew how to win matches.'
In fact that was Klugman's only problem: she never lost.
'She didn't play that many tournaments but she had an amazing record where she didn't lose a match for 18 months,' says Taylor. 'That is not a good thing - because she just got used to winning, she wasn't getting challenged. We had to play practice matches against adults.'
In her efforts to keep Klugman's feet bound to earth, Taylor had a helping hand from the sisters.
'They were saying when she won the 10 and under national, 'That's not that big of a deal',' says Taylor. 'Older siblings keep you grounded!'
Too many juniors these days know little beyond 'see ball, hit ball'. Klugman has a natural all-court gamestyle, reaching the Roland Garros final not with raw power but with her variety of spins and angles, her soft hands at the net.
'She still has to work very hard on the physical side of things,' says Taylor, who handed over the coaching role to Ben Haran three years ago but remains close to Klugman and her parents. 'And then mentally - it was very easy when she was always winning. When things are tough, that's when the mental side kicks in.'
And things were tough for Klugman last year. A top-six seed at all four junior Grand Slams, she did not make it beyond the third round and confidence was seeping away. Haran set up a lunch with Jack Draper, and as Klugman stormed into the French Open junior final earlier this month (in June), she credited that sitdown for helping her emerge stronger from a testing period.
Her journey has not been without its hardships but Klugman - born and raised in Wimbledon, spotted early by the LTA, they could hardly miss her, given she was on the doorstep - has always looked destined for the professional game.
The tale of Xu is more complicated, starting as it did in the tennis backwater of Swansea…
Mimi Xu
'My friend kept saying to me: you need to see this little girl,' coach Fran South tells me over the phone from Wales. 'Mimi came for a school thing at the tennis centre. She was pretty good but nothing blew me away apart from her competitiveness. Then I realized she was six years old - she was so big I assumed she was eight or nine.
'Her mum started pressing me to coach her but I had so many other players. Then I decided, if I don't take her on, she's just not going to make it round here. She's not going to get the chance.
'After two weeks, I was like, Oh my God, this girl is flying.'
Back to that competitiveness. 'She was properly loud. If she won a point, Mimi's always giving it a big 'Come on!'
'She used to get told off and I fell out with a couple of referees: leave her alone, let her express herself. I don't want it to be prim and proper.
'She did have a habit - if her opponent would say come on, she'd say it back. So you could have a six or seven exchange of 'Come on'. OK, we had to work on that a little bit!
'As she's got older she knows the correct way to do it but she hasn't lost that court presence.'
Xu, whose parents met as Chinese students at Swansea University and never left, has this month combined the most important tournaments of her life with the most important exams. She sat one biology paper in Birmingham the day before her quarter-final, another before her last-16 match in Nottingham. She sat her maths A Level in 2024 - two years early - and will do her economics exams next year.
It is a lot to juggle, and Xu takes on the logistics herself, writing her schedule by hand.
'Whatever she does, she wants to be the best she can,' says South. 'She's an all-round high achiever.
'In primary school she had almost completed all of her piano grades, she also played the violin.
'If she wanted to go to Harvard, she could go to Harvard, she'll hit those academic standards.'
On the court, Xu is a formidable physical specimen, 6ft 1in and able to generate huge force. South quickly knew her pupil had to cross the border to fulfil her potential.
'At 12 she was the best player in the program - and we have players up until the age of 18,' she says. 'It's not normal. She had outgrown Wales, basically.'
Aged 12, Xu left her parents and went to live, train and study at the LTA Academy in Loughborough.
There, she met another girl struggling to harness the awesome power bristling within her game.
Mika Stojsavljevic
'I got a call from a former LTA colleague,' begins Andrew Lewandowski. ''There's a girl we'd like you to see'.'
The girl was Stojsavljevic, daughter of a Serbian father and a Polish mother. Lewandowski, a former head of LTA talent spotting who now runs Middlesex tennis, saw a kid for whom keeping the ball in the court was not a central concern. 'She was seven and keen as mustard, spraying the ball around hitting it as hard as she could,' Lewandowski tells Mail Sport.
A couple of years later, Stojsavljevic's parents set up a meeting with Lewandowski, asking for advice and he has been involved ever since. He coached her for six years and now acts as a sort of director of tennis, helping the Stojsavljevic family to plot Mika's career.
Key to their athletic development was a determination to pursue other sports for as long as possible.
'At age 11 or 12 Mika was still representing St Benedict's school in hockey, cross country, she was a keen swimmer,' says Lewandowski. 'The family were sporty. Her dad had been at Arsenal as a junior, mum was a skier.'
As Mika began to work her way through national competitions, one name kept coming up.
'Everyone was talking about Hannah Klugman, she was like a monkey on Mika's back,' says Lewandowski. 'The first time they met, Mika didn't get a game, she was devastated. She played her again: 6-0, 6-0. Devastated.
'But I always said to her mum Eva, I'm so happy Mika came through with Hannah, because the media and the spotlight was all on her.
'There's always been that rivalry with Hannah.'
Would Mika have been regularly facing Xu, who has become a firm friend?
'She would be and she would be getting a good thrashing!' laughs Lewandowski. 'Mika was a long way behind those two. She hadn't been given LTA support as early as them. But she made up a lot of ground in a very spectacular way.'
That would be last September, when Stojsavljevic won the US Open junior title with a week of breathtaking shotmaking.
Relative to the other two, Stojsavljevic has suffered plenty of rejection, plenty of chastening defeats on her road towards professional tennis. But she has always come back for more.
'It's a personal resilience,' explains Lewandowski. 'Then it's also a well-balanced and focussed family. An exceptional family. Mika has a severely disabled sister who needs 24 hour care - she knows life is hard.
'Mika's come from behind but within the three of them there's that sense of one week one is doing better than the other.
'It's a good group. It's a great era.'