James climbs to 42 in World Junior Tennis rankings

Jamaica’s rising female tennis star,18-year old Alyssa James, has recently bolted from a ranking of 65 to 42 in the world, following a series of excellent

performances over the past three months.

Although she is still classified as a junior, James is without doubt one of Jamaica’s top female tennis players, and can hold her own today against any current local senior female player.

James, who mixes scholastic achievement with her prowess on the tennis court, has maintained a 3.74 grade point average academically, and recently committed to attending the University of Virginia, and play for their tennis team, starting later this year.

She is currently based at the renowned Mouratoglou Tennis Academy in Florida and her activities are being supervised by her father Marcus James, a former promising tennis player himself, who once served as a Tennis Jamaica Board member for many years.

Alyssa has been playing tennis overseas for a long time, and first made her mark internationally, when in 2017, as a nine-year-old student at Jamaica’s Hillel Academy, she won the the 8-12 age group at the Little Mo International Tennis Tournament in Florida. That tournament was named after Maureen “Little Mo” Connolly, who in 1953, at age 18, won the tennis Grand Slam of the Australian, French, US Open, and Wimbledon. A horse riding accident a year later, tragically ended her tennis career prematurely.

In 2022, at age 14, Alyssa became the first Jamaican female to win an International Tennis Federation (ITF) event.

She has made considerable progress since then, and was recently named a member of the International Tennis Federation’s Grand Slam Development Programme Touring team, which allows her to have a regular presence on the international circuit. The Touring programme’s stated objective is “to provide crucial support for talented players who might otherwise be unable to compete at the level they do.”

She recently competed in the Orange Bowl in Florida where she was a finalist in the doubles, at the Australian Open Junior Championships and at the J500 Gaspar tournament in Brazil. At the recently completed Brazil tournament, she reached the quarter-finals in the singles, and won the doubles with her partner Maia Llincia Burcescu from Romania. This victory was another first for James, as she is now the first Jamaican player to win a J500 title.

She has now won four ITF singles titles and five doubles titles, and plans to play in the other three Grand Slam tournaments this year, in France, the US and at Wimbledon in England.