Sonay Kartal interview: ‘There is no right way to look or right size you have to be’

The idea of a tennis player often conjures up an image of a tall, slender figure in a white dress, accompanied by a perfectly manicured lawn bathed in sunshine. But, as Sonay Kartal shows, there is more than one way to forge a career on the professional tour.

“There is no right way to look or right size you have to be,” says Kartal, who follows her own path. Since introducing herself to British tennis fans with her run to the third round of last year’s Wimbledon, her height, tattoos and oversized T-shirts have redefined expectations around the sport.

“You talk about clothing, but also about body types as well,” she explains when asked about her unique style. “Things are changing now, there are so many different players on the tour, they’re taller, they’re smaller, everyone has got different physiques, carrying more muscle, less muscle. I think it’s becoming more diverse on the tour with clothing as well, which I think is a good thing. I think people should be themselves on the court; you shouldn’t try and follow the stereotype.”

Other players might squeeze in modelling shoots between training sessions or leave a long list of tried-and-tested coaches in their wake, but Kartal keeps things simple. And it works.

In July 2024, she was ranked 298th in the world. But after going further at this summer’s Wimbledon than she did last year, she achieved a career-high position of No 44. It has been an extraordinary rise.

Eighteen months ago, few but the most ardent of tennis fans would have been aware of the 5ft 4in player from Brighton. Yet as the last British woman standing at SW19 this summer, Kartal gained admirers for her ice-cold demeanour and retro clothing as she reached the fourth round and made her Centre Court debut.

Although her summer US hard-court swing was affected by a persistent knee injury and she was knocked out in the first round of the US Open after suffering with intense cramp, the season ended with the biggest win of her career. Facing then-world No 5 Mirra Andreeva in the China Open, Kartal showcased some stunning shots against the talented teenager to reach the quarter-finals. It was a performance to cap off an impressive first full year on the WTA tour.

We met earlier this month, during the latest stage of Kartal’s evolution: an intense training block to prepare her body and her strokes for the new season. Some of that training will be spent in 40-plus-degree heat at the National Tennis Centre in Roehampton ahead of the Australian Open, but instead our conversation took place a few miles down the M23, at her local club in Hove.

Sitting in an armchair in the modest clubhouse overlooking the same courts she has played on since the age of six, it becomes clear why she has not strayed from home.

Her love of tennis did not strike as suddenly as the summer lightning that accompanied her Centre Court debut. Kartal followed her brother to a session and when asked to run to a service line, fell over and did not return for two months. But since being encouraged to return by Julie Hobbs [nee Pullin], who is still part of her coaching team today, she has not looked back.

“A lot of the members here have been following me for over 15 years so I absolutely love this club,” explains Kartal. “People always ask me why I don’t go to a bigger club with more high-performance facilities, but it has everything I need and it got me to the level where I’m at now, so I don’t feel there is a need to change.

“I’m super happy in this environment, I love the members here – they’re super friendly – and the coaches here. I don’t think I’m ever going to leave or change club at all.”

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That connection is clear as we are finishing our conversation. While waiting for a downpour to cease, one of those members arrives with a handful of Kartal’s rackets, presumably newly strung, to deliver. She walks over to the door to greet him, then tells him to keep the one she had used for the photo shoot.

If the Pavilion and Avenue Tennis Club is right behind Kartal, so too is her father. Muharrem, who is Turkish, has always been involved in her sporting career. After all, it was his nearby kebab shop that a handful of LTA coaches chose for dinner, before convincing a young Kartal to try the sport.

“My dad is tennis obsessed, loves watching it. His life is tennis,” the 24-year-old says.

In fact, Muharrem’s tennis obsession started long before Kartal showed promise in the sport. He even has two tennis tattoos, whereas she has chosen more indirect ways of referencing the sport in her body art.

Has he ever played the game himself? “No, he’s absolutely terrible. He doesn’t really understand anything about tennis, is just obsessed with watching it and is obsessed with [Roger] Federer.

“I’ll never forget my first-ever Wimbledon as a junior. He got too nervous so he left my match and went to watch Federer practice at Aorangi [Park]. After the match, he did show me all the pictures he got with [Rafael] Nadal and stuff.”

This is another way in which Kartal subverts the stereotype. A plethora of tennis players have been coached by their fathers; most famously Venus and Serena Williams, but also the likes of Caroline Wozniacki, Chris Evert, Sofia Kenin and Caroline Garcia. Yet Kartal’s father becomes so nervous that he cannot even sit in the stands for Kartal’s matches.

“He can’t watch me, I have to really tell him off,” she says with a small laugh. “He’s very expressive. He’s really bad. There are times when I was younger he’d come to watch, even recently he’d come to watch and I’d miss a shot and hands are in the air and I can hear him from the stands.”

Muharrem does his best to follow his daughter’s matches on TV instead, but for a long time he found even that too stressful, resorting to calling out for score updates from Kartal’s calmer mother Clare. He has begun to relax a little more recently and even managed to attend all four of Kartal’s Wimbledon singles matches this summer, albeit under strict instructions from her mother to behave.

Kartal might not follow her father’s lead on the court, but off it, she emulates his interest in tattoos. She has 14 of her own including two that reflect recent career milestones. After Wimbledon, she chose to commemorate her Centre Court debut with a thunder and lightning tattoo. She also added the number 329, in reference to her position in the chain of Great Britain’s team members for the Billie Jean King Cup. Her most meaningful one is not to do with tennis but in honour of her first dog, a golden retriever.

Tattoos are one way that Kartal expresses herself, and clothing is another. Instead of the traditional tennis dress or skort, she has always worn shorts, although they might be shorter than when she started.

“At the end of the day I’m going to wear what I’m comfortable wearing,” she says. “You’ve got a lot more important things to focus on, so I’m always wanting to be comfy and feel free on the court.”

At SW19, Kartal opted for a boxy collared polo-style shirt that she “loved”. It might not have been the most popular option for players on tour, but the men’s version was sold out online soon after the tournament finished.

There is little conventional about Kartal, whether we are talking about her strokes, her outfits or her journey to the professional tour. She is one of only a handful of British players to come from a state-school background. The under-representation of players from less affluent backgrounds is an ongoing concern for the sport and one that has been highlighted by that rare working-class success story in the British men’s game, Dan Evans.

As a junior, Kartal was not offered a place on the LTA’s funded programmes. Instead, her family have often had to fund her sporting ambitions themselves, with tennis players only reaping financial rewards once they are established in the top 100, a feat Kartal only achieved this year.

“They [her parents] sacrificed their whole lives for me to try and do this,” says Kartal. “You don’t have to come from a background that has loads of money [and] my parents weren’t exactly good at tennis. As long as you have people around you that you trust and have the determination and firepower, then I’d like to think that anything is possible.”

Yet you do not have to delve too far into the archives to find examples of early promise. A video captured at the NTC in 2011 shows a young Kartal contesting and winning a rally against Emma Raducanu.

It is tennis’s answer to the fable of hare and the tortoise. In the junior ranks there was more noise about Raducanu and two of her contemporaries, Holly Fischer and Kylie Bilchev, than Kartal. While her compatriot Raducanu soared up the junior and ITF rankings, Kartal battled a host of injuries and had to resort to attempting to train left-handed – typical of the stubbornness and resilience she says tennis teaches you – as she slipped down the rankings. When Raducanu lifted the trophy at Flushing Meadows in 2021, Kartal was ranked outside the top 1,000.

“Obviously we watched it and it was an incredible couple of weeks for her,” Kartal says. “It gave us all a bit of extra firepower and just the proof that anything is possible. It was super inspiring to watch someone that you’ve grown up with, that you were playing under-9 nationals with, lift the US Open trophy.”

Going into 2026, Raducanu and Kartal stand as the British No 1 and 2. But Kartal has never been content to be in the shadow of her more famous contemporary, who will start the new season at No 29 in the world. As she looks over at the courts she has spent so long training on, she shows a steely focus: “I’d like to see myself breaking into the top 30.”