About the Volvo Car Open

After the first quarter of the season played mainly on outdoor hard courts, culminating in the major events of Indian Wells and Miami, the tennis world’s eyes turn towards clay and many of the WTA Tour’s strongest players will opt to begin their warm-up for the French Open at the Volvo Car Open, the only women’s clay-court tennis event held on US soil.

Formerly known as the Family Circle Cup, the Volvo Car Open has another claim to uniqueness – it’s the only professional event on the ATP World or WTA Tours held on green clay.

First played in 1973, the year that the WTA Tour was formed in a landmark development for women’s sport and permanently changing the face of tennis, the history of the Volvo Car Open is intimately intertwined with the evolution of the WTA Tour itself. Rosie Casals, the first winner of the event when it was held in Hilton Head, was one of the ‘Original 9’ – the women, led by Billie Jean King, who signed $1 agreements with World Tennis publications publisher Gladys Heldman in 1970 to compete in what would become the Virginia Slims Series – and the Volvo Car Open’s stadium court is named after King herself. The Original 9 were reunited in April 2012 at the tournament’s 40-year anniversary.

The Volvo Car Open was the first women’s tournament to offer $100,000 in prize money and the first to be broadcast on network TV. Appropriately for an event which has played such a formative role in the evolution of the WTA Tour, its champions’ roll reads like a list of many of the all-time greats of women’s tennis. Chris Evert reigns supreme with an amazing eight titles between 1974 and 1985, one of just four women in the Open Era to win the same event seven or more times, with four-time champions Martina Navratilova (1982-3, 1988, 1990) and Steffi Graf (1986-7, 1989, 1993) also occupying prominent places on the roll of honour.

Gabriela Sabatini, Conchita Martinez, Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario, Martina Hingis, Jennifer Capriati, Mary Pierce and Venus Williams are also on the list of Volvo Car Open winners, while over the past decade Serena Williams has been the most dominant player, winning in Charleston in 2008 (d. Vera Zvonareva), 2012 (d. Lucie Safarova) and 2013 (d. Jelena Jankovic).

Williams has been joined in the Charleston winners’ circle by Sabine Lisicki (2009), Samantha Stosur (2010) and Caroline Wozniacki (2011), of whom Stosur went on to become a US Open champion while Lisicki and Wozniacki both reached Grand Slam finals and the Dane would become world no. 1. Andrea Petkovic defeated Jana Cepelova in the 2014 final to announce her return to the top echelons of women’s tennis after a painful series of injuries; she would go on to reach the semifinals of the French Open, and win titles in Bad Gastein and Sofia, cracking the top 10 for the second time at the beginning of 2015.

Angelique Kerber came into WTA Charleston Open in 2015 in dire need of form after a poor start to the season, but things ‘clicked’ for the left-handed, athletic German as she stormed through the draw before defeating big-serving American Madison Keys in the final. It was the first of four Premier-level WTA Tour titles Kerber would win in 2015 before going on to win her maiden Grand Slam title at the Australian Open. Kerber returned to defend her title in 2016 but it was young American Sloane Stephens who claimed her third and biggest title of the season so far, defeating Elena Vesnina in the final. Daria Kasatkina then broke through for the first title of her young career in 2017, overcoming fellow young gun and French Open champion in-waiting Jelena Ostapenko for the loss of just four games, 6-3 6-1.