Preview: all eyes on Cairo and the first J500 of 2025
The Australian Open Junior Championships – the first Junior Grand Slam of the season – has been and gone, with now the time for the world’s best junior players to knuckle down on the ITF World Tennis Tour Juniors.
The aim of any junior player during any given season is to continue their development as they work their way along the ITF player pathway towards the professional ranks and, ultimately, the ATP and WTA Tours.
Each season, there is the battle to finish as the year-end No. 1 boy and girl and be crowned an ITF World Champion as Nicolai Budkov Kjaer and Emerson Jones were following their 2024 campaigns.
After a number of J300s around the world – such events are currently taking place in Cairo and Lima – the first J500 of the season gets underway on Monday 10 February in Egyptian capital city Cairo.
J500 tournaments provide premier playing opportunities for players on the ITF World Tennis Tour Juniors and are effectively a rung below Junior Grand Slams in terms of standing and the ranking points on offer.
As in previous years, Cairo will be the first of seven J500 events on the calendar this year and will go some way to moulding the ITF World Tennis Tour Junior Rankings in the early stages of the season.
In 2023, Cairo made North African history by becoming the first venue in the region to host an J500 event. Despite Africa having a long-standing history of staging junior competitions, North Africa had never previously hosted a tournament of this stature.
Czechia’s Jana Kovackova is set to be the highest-ranked player in this year's girls’ draw. The 14-year-old was the most successful girl on the ITF World Tennis Tour Juniors last year, winning a combined 17 titles (eight singles and nine doubles).
This is the most titles won by a player on the ITF World Tennis Tour Juniors since 1994 when Federico Browne of Argentina won 21. With eight, Kovackova has also won the most singles titles on the ITF World Tennis Tour Juniors in 2024.
Serbia’s Luna Vujovic, Maya Iyengar of the United States, Japan’s Reina Goto and Sonja Zhenikhova of Germany are some of the other higher-ranked girls set to compete on the clay courts of Cairo.
In the boys’ draw, the likes of Poland’s Alan Wazny, Jacopo Vasami of Italy, Ivan Iutkin, Austria’s Thilo Behrmann and Benjamin Gusic Wan of Great Britain will be among those will silverware on their minds.
Further information on J500 Cairo, including full acceptance lists, is available here.