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Canadian tennis star Bianca Andreescu has confirmed that she will be playing in the 2022 San Diego Open. The WTA 500 event has a draw full of star players, with seven of the top-10 WTA players participating in the event. With the tournament including a 32-player draw, the number of eligible players for direct entry is rather limited.
While 2022 Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina may have to play the qualifiers, Andreescu will likely use her protected ranking to take part in the event, which is scheduled to start on 10 October 2022. After San Diego, Andreescu is also set to participate in the WTA 1000 event in Guadalajara, Mexico next week.
Bianca Andreescu hasn’t had the best of year in 2022 as she made her comeback on the tour in April. She reached the final of the Bad Homburg Open on grass courts in June, where she lost to Caroline Garcia. She then had a mediocre hardcourt stint in North America that led to a third-round loss at the US Open. She was touted to have a deep run in New York Major as she defeated Canadian Open finalist Beatriz Haddad Maia in the second round but once again lost to Garcia.
The 2019 U.S. Open champion decided to take a mental break from tennis in December 2021 and missed the start of the 2022 season. She wanted to “re-set, recover, and grow” after a challenging two years when she also got infected with COVID-19.
Talking about her mental space before taking the layoff, she addressed how she wanted to get completely away from tennis. “I literally wanted to quit this sport. It was so bad,” Andreescu told the Guardian before the US Open. “I didn’t want to hear about tennis or think about tennis, or anything even close to it for the first three months I was away. And then, after three months, I realized, ‘Oh shit, I really do miss this. And I need it in my life”, she wrote.
