By: Brayden Yin

Jennifer Brady’s promise as an American tennis rising star was out on hold by a series of injuries that kept her away from the tennis court for almost two years. Despite her successes in major tournaments, the journey to get there was hardly easy.

Her first notable accomplishment happened in 2020 at the U.S. Open, when the coronavirus pandemic was at its peak. She reached the semifinals even with strict public health precautions and an empty Arthur Ashe Stadium that held no paying spectators.

She repeated such a performance four months later at the Australian Open, when she reached the final round. She achieved this despite spending two weeks in quarantine inside her hotel room, hitting tennis balls against a mattress propped up on a wall, and pedaling a stationary bike inside the bathroom with the door closed and the hot shower running to mimic the tournament’s steamy conditions.

Her efforts landed her on the brink of the top 10 of the WTA singles rankings. But when the tennis world moved closer to “normal,” Brady was notably absent from tour.

She played in the Western and Southern Open on painkillers and was doing well in her second-round match, when she felt a sudden pain in her right knee and left heel. She was out of commission for almost two years, after she suffered from plantar fasciitis, and soon after, a stress fracture in her right knee, after compensating for the injury in her left foot. She also discovered she had a partial tear in her left plantar fascia. She had surgery on her right knee in March of 2022 to repair cartilage damage, but she still has foot pain.

After her two-year hiatus, she can finally return to the court.