The U.S. Open is nearing its dramatic climaxes, the semifinals and the
finals, and its narrative threads are becoming clearer. One of them—to
me, maybe the most memorable, even if it doesn’t figure in the making of
a champion—has been the emergence of a cohort of teen-age players:
youngsters with big, vibrant games and engaging on-court personalities.
Naomi Osaka, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Haitian father and a
Japanese mother, used her mini-Serena serve and developing adroitness to
easily upset last year’s women’s champion, Angelique Kerber. Another
nineteen-year-old, Andrey Rublev, defeated a couple of top-twenty
players on his way to a quarter-final match against Rafael Nadal,
becoming the youngest men’s player to get that far since Andy Roddick,
in 2001. And then there was Denis Shapovalov, with his oversized black
cap turned backward, his balletic one-handed backhand, and his fiery
charm. From the qualifying matches he needed to win to reach the Open
until his agonizing loss, on Sunday, to Spain’s Pablo Carreño Busta—7–6
(2), 7–6 (4), 7–6 (3)—the Canadian lefty phenom rallied fans with
boyishly daring tennis.

Osaka and Shapovalov are now out, and Rublev may join them soon. But
there are still plenty of young players battling this week in Flushing
Meadows: the best eighteen-and-under players in the world are in town
for the U.S. Open Junior Championships, and you can easily find a
courtside seat on the outer courts of the grounds and get a first
glimpse of the future. One of the things you’ll notice is that these
kids hit every bit as hard as the seasoned pros over on the show courts.
You’ll observe, too, that the unforced errors come in bunches and the
mood swings out of nowhere—these are teen-agers, after all. It will also
become clear soon enough that a lot of the juniors are American, and,
thanks to the opportunities afforded by Title IX and the example of the
Williams sisters, no small number of the most athletic girls in the
country are playing tennis. The United States currently has four girls
ranked in the junior top ten.

For now, Whitney Osuigwe just might be the very best of the very youngest.
This summer, she’s won the French Open juniors championship and, playing
doubles, a juniors’ runner-up trophy at Wimbledon. She entered the U.S.
Open juniors as the girls’ top seed. She is ranked No. 2 in the world,
just a handful of points behind another American, Claire Liu. Liu, whom
Osuigwe defeated to win the final at the French Open, decided to skip
the juniors this time and enter the Open’s main draw; she lost in the
first round. Liu is seventeen. Osuigwe is just fifteen. When I asked her,
the other day, whom she idolized growing up, she told me Victoria
Azarenka. “The way she fights,” she said. “And her hair.” Azarenka is
twenty-eight years old.

For Osuigwe (oh-see-gway), as for so many tennis wunderkinder today,
tennis is the family business. Her father, Desmond, grew up in Nigeria,
played briefly on the A.T.P. men’s tour, and, since the late nineties,
has been a teaching pro at the IMG Academy, in Brandenton, Florida,
which was, essentially, the first tennis boarding school, founded by
Nick Bollettieri. IMG has served as a training ground for Andre Agassi,
Jim Courier, Kei Nishikori, and many other leading pros. Whitney was on
court with a racquet, often in a Cinderella costume, by the time she was
three, and competing by the age of eight, with her father as her coach.
“I knew I wanted to be a tennis player probably since I was able to
walk,” she told me. Her father, seated with her at an umbrella-shaded
table on the patio of the Open’s media center, smiled softly. “We try to
balance our professional relationship, she and I, and our family
relationship,” he said. His words hung in the air for a moment. Then
Whitney said, “It’s definitely tough sometimes. You know, separating the
two. But he knows me the best.” Osuigwe is a high-school junior. She had
been attending classes at a local school but recently started taking
courses online; there are no plans for college. She turned pro earlier
this year.

Osuigwe arrived at the Open two weeks ago, to play in the qualifiers,
but lost her first match. She played her first juniors match on Monday.
The top seeds got to play their openers on the smaller show courts.
There were only a few hundred spectators on hand on the sun-splashed
grandstand as Osuigwe faced off against the sixteen-year-old Margaryta
Bilokin, a Ukrainian who goes to high school in Connecticut. Osuigwe is
five feet six and lithe—Bilokin appeared to loom over her as they met at
the net before play began. But Osuigwe hit with considerably more power
on her serves—one reached 110 m.p.h.—and on her whip-snap forehand. She
quickly won the first set. Then things got patchy. She was broken in the
next set’s first game. Her forehands were suddenly sailing long, her
double faults were mounting, and her body language was projecting
exasperation and unease.

This year, in the qualifying rounds and the junior tournaments, Open
officials are experimenting with allowing players to consult their
coaches midmatch, between games, when they are playing at the end of
the court, where there coaches are seated. Osuigwe took advantage. She
sat on the rail and listened to her father and Erik Kortland, a U.S.T.A.
junior-development coach. Once back in the match, she went more and more
to her slower, spinning kick-serve, placing it on Bilokin’s backhand,
where the high bounce was hard for Bilokin to handle. Osuigwe won the
match, 6–1, 6–4. Afterward, her father, Desmond, told me, “One of the
things about growing up at IMG is that she got to play against boys as
well as girls. The boys, they have kick serves.” Whitney said, “I think
I just had some first-round jitters out there. But I am a confident
player and can adjust my game.”

Being a junior prodigy is no guarantee of professional success. Young
teens get injured, burn out. You would recognize the names of a number
of U.S. Open girls’ champions over the past twenty years—Azarenka won in
2005—but others . . . Osuigwe understands that, too. “I look at the
bigger picture, I see the ups and downs,” she said. “This is what I want
to do with my life.”