To get to Wimbledon Centre Court, Davey Jevans would turn left from her office, then right past the trophies honoring past champions. A few more steps, the same steps taken by the finalists, and Jevans would be standing on the hallowed grass.
“Centre Court is a really special place,” Jevans, the first female president of the All England Club, said in a video conference last month. “The court is pristine, the flowers are amazing, you can see St Mary’s Church in the background. I feel incredibly proud and grateful to the hundreds of people who have helped us get to this point.”
Seeing the elegant, lush grass of the Wimbledon Open is like stepping back in time for players and fans alike, one of the biggest reasons being that playing professional matches on grass is as elusive as the Wimbledon title itself.
Iga Swiatek has played 23 of her 400 career matches on WTA grass court singles. The world number one has never advanced beyond the quarterfinals at Wimbledon.
Newly crowned world number one in men’s tennis, Jannik Sinner enters Wimbledon having only played one ATP grass-court tournament this year. He won against Hubert Hurkacz in Halle, Germany, on June 23, and has played only nine times in his career, including a five-set loss to Novak Djokovic in the 2022 Wimbledon quarterfinals.
Carlos Alcaraz won 12 straight on grass, including titles at Queen’s Club and Wimbledon last year, but was upset by Jack Draper in the round of 16 at Queen’s Club about two weeks ago. At Wimbledon last year, Alcaraz beat Djokovic in five sets. He also won the 2022 US Open on hardcourts. When he won the French Open on clay this year, he became the youngest player to win three majors on three different surfaces.
“Every time I step on a grass court, I have to learn how to move better, how to play better,” Alcaraz said after his first-round win at Queen’s Club in June. “So I feel like I’m still learning.”
The grass court tennis season is precariously short, with just eight ATP tournaments and seven WTA events this year, spread across several weeks.
In 2025, the Hall of Fame Open in Newport, Rhode Island, will be discontinued, leaving one less week for the ATP on grass. Professional tennis has been played on grass at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport almost every year since the first US National Lawn Tennis Championships, the predecessor to the US Open, began in 1881. The Hall of Fame Open is the only remaining ATP grass-court tournament in the United States.
By comparison, the ATP Tour this year has 40 hard-court tournaments and 22 clay-court tournaments, including the Paris Olympics, out of a total of 70 tournaments. The WTA has 56 tour-level tournaments this season, 36 of which are hard-court and 13 are clay. The numbers are similar in 2025.
Grass is inherently a difficult surface to maintain and master. Wimbledon’s groundskeepers spend most of the year cultivating and laying the perfect turf. They even employ STRI, a British company founded in 1929 to help Golf St. Andrews in Scotland improve its greens, to ensure the grass is clean and easy to play.
London’s frequent rains make grass courts difficult to maintain, and Frances Tiafoe, Dan Evans and Wimbledon women’s champion Marketa Vondrousova all fell during the June tournament and missed out on Wimbledon. While grass court maintenance is not easy, it requires a different skill set for players.
When Martina Navratilova won Wimbledon nine times between 1978 and 1990 and Pete Sampras won seven times between 1993 and 2000, the grass was smoother, rewarding players who used powerful slice backhands and serves and volleys. Then, in 2001, the tennis club changed the surface from a rye mix to rye grass, which kept the ground dry and firm, making the courts a little more like hard courts. But it’s still a soft surface, so it’s probably kinder on players’ bodies than the constant pounding on pavement.
“I would like to see more tournaments played on grass,” Navratilova said. “It allows the body to stay on the natural surface longer.”
Current players agree with this.
“There’s something pure about the grass at Wimbledon,” said Christopher Eubanks, who won his only ATP title on grass in Mallorca last year and is now a quarter-finalist at Wimbledon. “If you like to strike the ball cleanly and be efficient on your serve, you’ll be rewarded on grass. If you like to slice and rip the ball, you’ll be fine on grass.”
The problem for players is that the surfaces are constantly changing throughout the year and there are too few tournaments on grass. The two major championships, the French Open on clay and Wimbledon on grass, are only three weeks apart. It’s all part of the game, Eubanks said.
“We all know that when you play professional tennis, there are seasons,” he said. “You start on hard courts, then you move to clay, then you move to grass, and then you spend the rest of your time on hard courts. You know you’re only going to have four, maybe five weeks on grass, so it’s important to make the most of it. The variety of surfaces is part of what makes tennis great.”
This year’s tour schedule adds another wrinkle, as the Paris Olympics are held on the red dirt at Roland Garros just weeks after Wimbledon, meaning the occasional snappy movement required on grass will have to be abandoned in favor of sliding on dirt.
For some, the schizophrenic schedule takes its toll. While natural clay-court players like Alcaraz, Swiatek and 14-time French Open champion Rafael Nadal cherish the chance to win gold on clay, others like Tiafoe, Aryna Sabalenka, Ons Jabeur, Ben Shelton, Sebastian Korda, Madison Keys and Emma Raducanu are opting out of the Olympics, saying the risk of injury isn’t worth it.
Fifty years ago, three of the four majors were played on grass: the Australian Open at Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club in Melbourne, Wimbledon, and the US Open at West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, New York. Then, in 1975, the US Open was first played on green clay, then on hard courts in 1978, when the tournament moved to the USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows. The Australian Open moved to hard courts in 1988.
For many, the appeal of Wimbledon is that it is still played on grass.
“There is no tournament that makes you feel like a champion more than Wimbledon,” Navratilova said. “Most kids dream of winning more than any other tournament. When you go in there, you feel the history. And the grass courts are part of that history.”
Asked whether Wimbledon would ever change its surface to make it more suitable for playing on hard courts, Jevans, a former tour player who still finds time to play on grass, took no time in answering.
“No,” she said, looking out her office window at the All England Club ground. “That’s my answer. Wimbledon is Wimbledon.”
