Lilli Tagger: The 18-Year-Old Austrian With the Rarest Shot in Tennis

There is a sound that has very nearly disappeared from women's tennis. It is the sound of a one-handed backhand: a slightly hollower, later, more resonant knock than the two-handed version, the noise of a ball struck by a player whose whole body has to arrive at the right place at the right instant, because there is no second hand to bail her out.

On Monday afternoon at Flushing Meadows, on an outside court with a few hundred people leaning on the railings, you could hear it again. An 18-year-old from a valley town in the Austrian Alps was hitting it, over and over, and by the end of the first set the small crowd had grown into a large one, because word travels quickly at the US Open when something on court is worth looking at.

Her name is Lilli Tagger. She won 6-0, 7-6(4), against the German Tamara Korpatsch, and it was the first main-draw win of her life at a Grand Slam. If you follow tennis rather than play it, she is about to become one of your favourites, and it will take you roughly one backhand to work out why.

Two hours on a side court

The first set took barely half an hour. Tagger did not so much beat Korpatsch as remove her from the equation: 6-0, no argument, the kind of set that makes an experienced pro look up at her box with a face that says, what exactly am I supposed to do about this.

The second set was the education. Korpatsch is 31 and has spent a decade grinding out a living in a sport that does not hand out free weeks. She started finding the lines. She dragged Tagger into longer rallies. And Tagger, who had been playing as if the whole thing were a training drill, suddenly had to hold serve under pressure at a major for the first time in her career, in a stadium that was filling up specifically to watch her fail.

She did not fail. She got to a tie-break and won it 7-4. The whole thing took nearly two hours, which is a long time for a 6-0, 7-6 scoreline, and that is rather the point: the numbers say routine, the tennis said anything but.

Afterwards she talked about the wobble like a much older player. "I think she started playing well," Tagger said of Korpatsch. "She also played very well at the beginning of the second set. Maybe I made some more mistakes, and she started to play a little bit better. It can happen. I think the most important thing to learn from it is how fast you come out of it."

How fast you come out of it. Not a bad philosophy for eighteen.

A town at the end of a valley

Tagger was born on 17 February 2008 in Lienz, which sits in East Tyrol, a piece of Austria that is cut off from the rest of Tyrol by mountains and looks south towards Italy rather than north towards Innsbruck. It is beautiful and it is small. It is not, on any reasonable reading, a place that produces top-50 tennis players.

Except that tennis was already in the house. Her mother, Sabine, played in the Austrian Bundesliga. Her father, Stephan, is a keen club player. There are two siblings, Emma and Ben, who also grew up with rackets in their hands. This was not a family that had to be sold on the sport; it was a family that had to work out what to do when one of the children turned out to be unusually good at it.

Austria is a country that knows exactly how to develop a downhill skier and has far less of a production line for tennis. Every step Tagger took after the age of about eleven involved leaving somewhere.

The bet she had to win

Here is the story that tells you most about her, and it happened when she was ten.

She wanted a one-handed backhand. Not because a coach recommended it, not because it suited her build, but because she had been watching Roger Federer and she had been watching Dominic Thiem, the Austrian who hit perhaps the most violent one-hander the men's game has ever seen. She wanted that shot. She asked to switch.

Her coach said no. What her coach said, in effect, was: prove it. It took two years of asking, and it took winning a bet with him, before she was allowed to play the shot she wanted to play. Two years is an eternity when you are ten. Most children would have shrugged and gone back to the two-hander, which is easier to learn and far more likely to keep you employed.

She did not shrug. And when she talks about the shot now, she does not describe it as a stylistic choice or a throwback or a marketing asset. Asked about it earlier this year after a loss to Maria Sakkari in Rome, she called it simply the most natural shot she has.

That is worth sitting with for a moment. In the entire top 50 of women's tennis you can count the one-handed backhands on the fingers of one hand and have fingers left over. The shot has been engineered out of the women's game by coaches for perfectly rational reasons: it is harder to hit above shoulder height, harder to block back a 190 km/h serve with, harder to teach. What Tagger is doing is not nostalgia. It is a bet that the shot's ceiling is higher than its floor is low, and at six foot one, with the reach and the leverage to hit it, she may well be right.

Leaving home at thirteen

At 13 she began travelling regularly to Vicenza, in northern Italy, to train. There was no boarding facility, so she moved in with her trainer's family. Consider that as a parent rather than as a fan: a thirteen-year-old, a different country, a different language, somebody else's kitchen table.

Alex Vittur, a figure from the Pustertal on the Italian side of those same mountains, was instrumental in the next move, which was the one that mattered most. He helped arrange her transition to the academy of Francesca Schiavone, near Varese, north of Milan.

If you were designing a coach for Lilli Tagger in a laboratory, you would design Francesca Schiavone.

The woman who won Roland Garros with the same shot

Schiavone won the French Open in 2010. She was 29, and she beat Samantha Stosur in the final to become the first Italian woman to win a Grand Slam singles title. She did it with a one-handed backhand, a slice that could take the paint off a line, and a competitive streak that occasionally frightened people.

She is now the person telling an 18-year-old Austrian how to use the same shot, alongside coach Lorenzo Frigerio. There is something quite moving about that pairing. Schiavone spent a career being told her backhand was a liability against the biggest hitters, and then she won a major with it on the surface where it was supposed to be least effective. She is uniquely qualified to tell a teenager to ignore the noise.

You can see the influence in Tagger's court positioning: she takes the ball early, comes forward when the point invites it, and uses the slice as a weapon rather than an apology. That is a coaching fingerprint.

Paris, 2025

In June 2025 she went to Roland Garros for the junior event and produced one of the more emphatic weeks the juniors have seen in years.

Unseeded. Six matches. Four seeded players beaten, including the No. 1 and the No. 3. Not a single set dropped along the way. In the final she beat Britain's Hannah Klugman 6-2, 6-0, which is not a scoreline you often see in a Grand Slam junior final, and became the first Austrian to win the girls' singles title in Paris.

Junior titles are a notoriously unreliable predictor; for every champion who becomes a household name there are three who never translate it. What made Tagger's week different was the manner. She did not scrap her way through. She overwhelmed people.

Thirteen points in Jiujiang

Four months later she got a wild card into the Jiangxi Open in Jiujiang, China. It was her first WTA main draw. She was 17.

In the semi-final she played Viktorija Golubic, the defending champion and a fellow one-hander, which made it, briefly, the best-looking match on the planet. Tagger trailed 5-2 in the deciding set. She then went down triple match point at 5-4.

She won thirteen consecutive points.

Thirteen points from triple match point down, at 17, in your first tour-level event, to reach your first final. She lost that final to Anna Blinkova 6-3, 6-3, and by then it hardly mattered. She had become the first player born in 2008 to reach a WTA final, and everyone who watches the sport closely had written the name down.

If you enjoy this particular flavour of story, the unranked outsider crashing a party they were not invited to, we wrote about a similar one in Paris this year when Jesper de Jong turned a lucky-loser slot into the run of his life.

The year she stopped being a prospect

2026 is the year the label changed from talent to player.

It started slowly. At the Australian Open she lost in the final round of qualifying, which stings more than a first-round exit because you can see the main draw from there. At Roland Garros she made her Grand Slam main-draw debut and ran the 32nd seed, Wang Xinyu, extremely close before going out in the first round. At Wimbledon she lost in the first round again, in three sets. Three majors, three exits, no wins, and a pile of encouraging reviews that do not pay for anything.

Then came July, and Prague.

At the Livesport Prague Open she won her first WTA title in only her tenth tour-level main draw. She came through a first-set tie-break against Ukraine's Daria Snigur in the final and closed it out in straight sets. In doing so she became the first player born in 2008 or later to win a WTA singles title, which is the sort of record that sounds like trivia until you realise what it actually measures: she got there before an entire generation did.

The ranking followed immediately. On 27 July 2026 she reached a career high of No. 45 in the world, making her the youngest player in the top 50. She arrived in New York unseeded, because only the top 32 get seeds, which is why a 10th seed found her in the second round rather than in the fourth.

What Austria has been waiting for

Austrian tennis has had two great modern chapters and both of them are closed.

Barbara Schett reached No. 7 in the world in September 1999 and became, for a generation of Austrians, the face of the sport. Sybille Bammer, a late bloomer who came back after having a child, peaked at No. 19 in December 2007. Since then Austrian women's tennis has been near-misses and small breakthroughs rather than sustained presence at the top.

The men had Thiem, of course, and Thiem had New York. In 2020 he came back from two sets down against Alexander Zverev in the final to win the US Open, the only Grand Slam title of his career, hit with the same one-handed backhand a ten-year-old girl in Lienz had been begging her coach to let her copy. He retired in 2024, and Austrian tennis has been quiet ever since.

It is not quiet this week.

Next: the woman who nearly won this thing

Tagger's reward for that first Slam win is Amanda Anisimova.

The American is the No. 10 seed here and she was standing on Arthur Ashe last September as the runner-up, having lost the 2025 final to Aryna Sabalenka 6-3, 7-6(3). She came back this year saying plainly that she intends to go one better. She opened her tournament on her 25th birthday by hitting 25 winners past her compatriot Ashlyn Krueger, which is either an excellent omen or an extremely well-organised coincidence.

Anisimova is, in the most literal sense, the worst possible match-up for a young one-hander. She hits flat, she hits early, and she hits the ball at a height that is designed by physics to hurt a single-handed backhand. She takes time away. She will not give Tagger the shoulder-high loopy ball that lets a one-hander step in and produce the shot you came to watch.

Which is exactly why it is worth your evening. Nobody sensible expects Tagger to win. Every teenager who becomes a champion has a first match like this one, and most of them lose it and learn more than they would have from a win.

For context on how fast this can move, Mirra Andreeva was a 19-year-old dark horse in Paris this spring and is now the No. 5 seed here. The gap between prospect and contender in the women's game is currently about eighteen months wide.

Why the shot matters, even if the result does not go her way

Let us be honest about why this player is getting attention out of proportion to her ranking.

Partly it is the age and the trajectory. Mostly it is the backhand, and the reason it matters is what it does to the people watching. A two-handed backhand is an efficient, powerful, entirely admirable piece of engineering. A one-hander is a gesture. It has follow-through. It leaves the player standing in a shape you could photograph and hang on a wall, arm extended, racket high, weight still moving forward. Tennis is a sport that people watch partly for how it looks, and this shot looks like nothing else in the modern women's game.

There is a practical argument too. Variety is what makes a match a contest of ideas rather than of ball speed. Tagger can slice, come forward, and change the height and pace of a rally in a way a pure baseline hitter cannot. If she becomes what her coaches believe she can, she will be an awkward opponent for the flat hitters who dominate now, and awkward players have always been the ones who spring surprises at majors.

And there is a third thing, which is harder to write down. Somewhere at this moment there is a nine-year-old at a club in Graz or Bristol or Ohio, hitting two-handed because that is what everyone is taught, who is going to see this Austrian on television and ask her coach the same question Lilli Tagger asked hers. Some of those coaches will say no. One of them will say yes.

What to look for when they play

Watch her feet, not her hands. The one-hander only works when she has time to set up sideways, and Anisimova's entire game is built on denying opponents time. If Tagger is arriving at the ball early and hitting through it, she is in the match. If she is stretching, or hitting it off the back foot, or slicing when she does not want to, she is in trouble.

Watch her second serve. At six foot one she has genuine serve potential, and the first serve already gets her free points. Against a returner as clean as Anisimova, the second serve is where the match will actually be decided.

And watch how she handles the noise. Flushing Meadows is the loudest, rudest, most gloriously distracted Grand Slam on earth, and that is a lot of stadium for a girl from a town of 12,000 people facing an American who spent last September becoming a national story.

The last time she felt properly uncomfortable on a tennis court, in the second set on Monday, she was asked what she took from it, and she talked about how quickly you come out of it. She will find out this week, in front of an audience that will not be entirely on her side, whether that holds up at the level above.

Whatever the scoreboard says at the end of it, one thing is already settled. For one week at the end of an American summer, the most beautiful shot in tennis has a teenager hitting it on the biggest stage the sport has, and the rest of us get to watch her decide what to do with it. You can follow the rest of her fortnight on her player page, and her opponent's story so far on Amanda Anisimova.

Photo: Lilli Tagger by Karney Hatch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.