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On a side practice court at the Stade Roland Garros this week, Casper Ruud's two-week-old daughter slept through her father's serve drills inside a baby carrier worn by his physio. A few corridors away, Naomi Osaka's daughter Shai — almost three now — was being walked between the players' lounge and the practice area by a member of the family team. Two days earlier, in Rome, the WTA had updated its Top 10 rankings to confirm that for the first time in the tour's history, two of the ten women ranked highest in the world were active mothers playing alongside their toddlers.
The two mothers in the Top 10 are Belinda Bencic, the Swiss former US Open champion who returned to the tour in late 2024 after the birth of her daughter Bella, and Elina Svitolina, the Ukrainian whose own daughter Skai goes home in the evenings to a father who happens to be the Frenchman about to play his final Roland Garros. The Bencic-Svitolina pairing inside the Top 10 is, statistically, the first time in WTA history two mothers have been ranked simultaneously among the ten best players in the world.
It is also the visible part of a much wider shift. Tennis used to lose its stars to family life. The 2026 generation is bringing the family to the tour.
The list, briefly
The active players on the 2026 tour who are competing as parents is now long enough that listing it is its own data point.
Mothers on the WTA Tour, currently active:
- Belinda Bencic (Switzerland) — daughter Bella born 2024, returned to the tour late 2024, climbed back into the Top 10 in early 2026.
- Elina Svitolina (Ukraine) — daughter Skai born 2022, currently fresh off winning the 2026 Italian Open final over Coco Gauff and beating Iga Swiatek in the semi-final.
- Naomi Osaka (Japan) — daughter Shai born July 2023, returned January 2024, now WTA No. 14 and the most discussed Roland Garros 2026 comeback story.
- Caroline Wozniacki (Denmark) — daughter Olivia and son James, returned to the tour in 2023 after a three-year hiatus, announced a third pregnancy in 2025.
- Petra Kvitova (Czech Republic) — son Petr born summer 2024, returned to competition in February 2025 in Austin after fifteen months and a C-section recovery.
- Tatjana Maria (Germany) — two daughters, named WTA Comeback Player of the Year following her second maternity leave.
- Victoria Azarenka (Belarus) — son Leo born 2016, returned to the tour and reached the US Open and Australian Open finals as a mother.
- Angelique Kerber (Germany) — daughter Liana, returned to play, currently in semi-retirement.
Fathers on the ATP Tour, currently active:
- Casper Ruud (Norway) — newborn daughter (late 2025), credited the daughter publicly as the "lucky charm" of his Rome 2026 final run.
- Novak Djokovic (Serbia) — son Stefan (2014) and daughter Tara (2017), travels both children to Slams with his wife Jelena.
- Jannik Sinner (Italy) — not a parent.
- Carlos Alcaraz (Spain) — not a parent.
The asymmetry is meaningful. The WTA, in 2026, has at least eight active parent-mothers competing at varying levels of the tour. The ATP has fewer top-level parents because the male tour has historically been able to coexist with paternity less disruptively — the men do not give birth, take maternity leave, or come back through Special Ranking. The story for the WTA is, structurally, more remarkable.
Why the Bencic-Svitolina Top 10 milestone matters
For most of the WTA's fifty-three-year history, a top-ten ranking was incompatible with active motherhood. Kim Clijsters did it in the late 2000s; Lindsay Davenport partially. Before them, almost nobody. The pattern was simple: female players retired, had children, sometimes attempted a comeback that landed them somewhere outside the Top 50 before they retired again.
The 2010s and 2020s broke that pattern in pieces. Serena Williams returned from the 2017 birth of her daughter Olympia and reached four Grand Slam finals as a mother. Victoria Azarenka reached the 2020 US Open final ten months after returning. Caroline Wozniacki has the most quietly impressive comeback of all of them, returning at thirty-three with two small children and re-cracking the Top 100.
But none of those returns produced two mothers in the Top 10 at the same time.
Bencic returned in late 2024 — fourteen months after the birth of Bella — and immediately won three smaller tournaments. By March 2026 she was back inside the top twenty. By April she was top ten. Her current ranking is the fastest top-ten return from maternity leave in WTA history.
Svitolina's return started earlier. She gave birth to Skai in October 2022, returned to the tour in March 2023, reached a Wimbledon quarter-final that summer, and has been a top-fifteen player ever since. Her Rome 2026 final win over Gauff was, mathematically, the run that put her back inside the Top 10 for the first time in three years.
The combined statistic — two mothers in the Top 10 simultaneously — has structural meaning. It says: at the very highest level of the women's game, being a parent and being a Slam-final-capable player are no longer mutually exclusive.
Casper Ruud's "lucky charm"
The ATP version of the story is smaller in number but louder in personal disclosure. Casper Ruud's daughter was born in late 2025. He skipped Monte Carlo with a knee issue, rehabilitated at the Rafa Nadal Academy in Manacor, returned to play Madrid as the defending champion, lost earlier than expected, and then reached the Rome 2026 final by beating five clay specialists in a row.
After the Rome final loss to Jannik Sinner, Ruud was asked about his run. His answer — quoted by ATP coverage and by his own post-match interview — credited his daughter directly. He said becoming a father had restructured his match-day psychology. The bad days mattered less. The good days mattered less in a different way. The tennis fit, finally, into a life that was about more than the tennis.
For a player whose career has been defined by three Slam finals lost to the three players he most identified with on clay — Nadal, Djokovic, Alcaraz — the comment landed as a particularly clean piece of professional self-understanding. The 2026 Ruud has the most stable off-court structure of his career. He also has, in the same year, the cleanest competitive path he has ever had.
The phrase "lucky charm" was a joke. The infrastructure underneath it is real.
How the WTA changed the rules
The WTA's Special Ranking rule — which allows returning mothers to use a frozen pre-maternity ranking for entry into a limited number of tournaments — was the most consequential rule change the women's tour has made in the past decade. It was introduced in stages between 2017 and 2019. It has now been used by every active mother on the Top 100, with the partial exception of those whose maternity leaves were so short they did not need it.
The rule does three things. It lets a returning mother enter Slam main draws without grinding through qualifying. It gives her time to find her form against the level of opponents she actually used to play. And it removes the binary choice that defined the previous generation: take a year off and lose your ranking, or come back too fast.
The result is that the average maternity-leave-to-Top-100 return time has compressed from roughly thirty months in the early 2010s to roughly twelve to fifteen months in 2025-2026. Kvitova returned at fifteen months. Bencic returned at fourteen. Osaka returned at six. Wozniacki at thirty-six, but with a different cause — a hard retirement followed by a soft return three years later.
For comparison, the men's tour does not need an equivalent rule because paternity does not require a structural absence from competition. Ruud kept playing the entire spring his daughter was being prepared for and arriving.
Naomi Osaka and the shape of the modern comeback
Osaka's return is the case study most teams reference. She gave birth in July 2023. She was back at Brisbane in January 2024. She lost early there, lost first round in Melbourne, lost in three sets at Roland Garros to Iga Swiatek in the second round. The first year was the rebuild. The second year — 2025 — produced the 2025 US Open semi-final and the partnership with coach Tomasz Wiktorowski that has now defined her 2026.
What made Osaka's comeback different was that she did not pretend the absence was about anything other than what it was. She talked openly about post-partum recovery. She brought her daughter to tournaments — the family unit travels with her. She declined to perform the celebrity-comeback narrative, the one in which the player is supposed to dispatch their first opponent in 47 minutes and announce that the time off was the best thing that ever happened to her career.
She lost matches. She gave neutral interviews. She let the recovery take the time it actually takes. The result, two and a half years later, is the most credible long-form comeback the WTA has produced since Williams's 2018 return.
The Big Three as fathers
The pattern on the men's side, where the absence is shorter, is the visibility. Novak Djokovic married his wife Jelena in 2014. Their son Stefan was born in October 2014, their daughter Tara in September 2017. Both children have travelled to most of his Slams. The family box at Court Philippe-Chatrier and at Rod Laver Arena has, for over a decade, been a publicly recognised piece of the Djokovic theatre.
Roger Federer, retired since 2022, has four children — twin girls Charlene Riva and Myla Rose (born 2009) and twin boys Leo and Lenny (born 2014). The girls, now 16, have trained intermittently at the Rafael Nadal Academy in Mallorca; Federer has said publicly that they have never been particularly interested in pursuing tennis professionally. The boys have spent more time on courts. Federer's own framing is hands-off: he has been clear that he wants the children to choose their sport, not to inherit his.
Rafael Nadal, also retired, has two sons — the first born in 2022, the second (Miquel) in August 2024. The first son has now appeared at several Mallorca tributes alongside Federer, Djokovic, Murray, Alcaraz and Swiatek. Nadal himself has said that fatherhood was the single biggest change in his perspective in the last decade of his playing career.
The Big Three's family lives have, by accident, become a parenting template for the next generation. Sinner is unlikely to follow it — at 24, he is not yet showing signs of starting a family — but the cohort just below him (Ruud at 27, Alex de Minaur and Katie Boulter heading toward a 2026 wedding, Cameron Norrie engaged, Sebastian Korda engaged) is the cohort about to follow it.
Svitolina-Monfils: the tennis family unit
The most concentrated version of the parenting story in 2026 is the Svitolina-Monfils household. Both are tour players. They married in 2021. Their daughter Skai was born in October 2022. The marriage has produced one of the most visible mixed-tour families in the sport: Monfils on the ATP, Svitolina on the WTA, the daughter on a coordinated schedule between them.
The week before Roland Garros 2026 has been, for them, particularly loaded. Monfils is preparing for his Roland Garros farewell event on Thursday May 21, an evening curated around his career that includes music, friends and a 7:30 p.m. exhibition on Court Philippe-Chatrier. Svitolina is preparing for the main draw on the other side of the same building, having won Rome two weekends earlier and arrived as a top-five threat on the women's side. Their daughter is, presumably, somewhere between the two of them.
It is the most concentrated piece of evidence the sport has, at the moment, that family life and elite competition can run side by side. Most tennis families operate at one level removed: the spouse is not also a tour player. The Svitolina-Monfils household is the model where everything happens inside the same building.
What this generation got right
There are three patterns underneath the parenthood arc.
One: the maternity-leave-to-return window has shrunk dramatically. The rule changes, the medical infrastructure, the partner support structures, the social acceptance of the working mother in professional sport have all pulled the average return time down by more than a year compared to the 2000s.
Two: returning mothers are reaching the Top 10, not just the Top 100. Bencic and Svitolina are the proof. The next decade will probably produce a Slam champion who is also a mother — Osaka's 2025 US Open semi-final was the closest the field came to it last year.
Three: parents on the men's tour are being more visibly present. Ruud crediting his daughter on a global press platform after a Masters 1000 final is the kind of public framing that, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the men's tour did not produce. The Sampras-Agassi era of male tennis kept family life almost entirely off-camera. The 2026 cohort treats it as part of the public narrative.
The cumulative effect is a different sport in 2026 than it was in 2016. The locker rooms have children in them. The on-tour schools have grown. The family-room infrastructure at the Slams has expanded. The audience that watches the matches now sees the visible evidence — kids in the player box, partners on the practice court, parents in the post-match interviews — that the sport's elite have built lives wider than the calendar.
Confirmed, and what is just mood
Confirmed: in May 2026 the WTA Top 10 contains two active mothers — Belinda Bencic and Elina Svitolina — for the first time in tour history. Confirmed: Bencic returned to the tour in late 2024 after the birth of her daughter Bella, and climbed back into the Top 10 in April 2026. Confirmed: Svitolina won the 2026 Italian Open on May 17, defeating Coco Gauff in three sets. Confirmed: Naomi Osaka's daughter Shai was born in July 2023; Osaka returned to competition in January 2024 and is the No. 14 seed at Roland Garros 2026. Confirmed: Casper Ruud's daughter was born in late 2025; he credited her publicly after the Rome 2026 final. Confirmed: Petra Kvitova returned to the tour in February 2025, fifteen months after the birth of her son Petr. Confirmed: Caroline Wozniacki returned in 2023 after a three-year hiatus and announced a third pregnancy in 2025. Confirmed: Tatjana Maria was named WTA Comeback Player of the Year following her second maternity-leave return. Confirmed: Novak Djokovic has two children (Stefan, October 2014; Tara, September 2017); Roger Federer has four (twin girls born 2009, twin boys born 2014); Rafael Nadal has two sons (the first born 2022, Miquel born August 2024).
Confirmed by Ruud: that his daughter restructured his match-day psychology, the bad days now matter less, the family unit has stabilised what tennis is for him. Confirmed by Federer: his daughters "were never passionate about tennis," and he was "relieved about it."
Not confirmed: whether any of the engaged-but-not-yet-married players (Aryna Sabalenka and Georgios Frangulis, Maria Sakkari and Konstantinos Mitsotakis, Sebastian Korda and Ivana Nedved, Tommy Paul and Paige Lorenze, Alex de Minaur and Katie Boulter, Cameron Norrie and Louise Jacobi) will become parents inside their current tour years. Not confirmed: any wider tour-policy changes for paternity on the ATP side; the men's tour does not yet operate Special Ranking equivalence for the rare case of a primary-caregiver father on extended leave.
The bottom line
The shift is generational and structural at the same time. The generational version is the cohort: players born between 1989 and 2000 are entering the years in which most professionals get married and become parents, and the tour has provided them with rule changes, medical support and travel infrastructure that lets them stay in the sport while doing it.
The structural version is what the audience now sees. The player box used to be parents, coach, agent. It now also contains a partner, two children, a stroller and, more often than not, a former tour player from the previous era who is on the off-week visit. The locker room used to be silent. It now has a daycare wing. The post-match interview used to be a tactical summary. It now opens, regularly, with the player crediting a newborn daughter for the run.
Tennis is no longer a sport that demands its players give up the rest of their lives until their professional clock runs out. The class of 2026 has, finally, won the argument the previous generation only began.
The next time a Slam final happens on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon in Paris, Wimbledon, New York or Melbourne, look at the player box. Half of it will be doing the thing every Slam final has ever produced. The other half — increasingly — will be sleeping in a baby carrier or making faces at the camera in the second changeover. That is what the modern tour finally looks like.
Sources
- WTA: Mother's Day on tour — players reshaping the comeback conversation
- WTA: Mom's the Word — Serena, Vika & active WTA mothers
- ATP Tour: Parenthood on ATP Tour
- ATP Tour: Casper Ruud's lucky charm — Norwegian credits newborn daughter for Rome run
- Tennis.com: Petra Kvitova announces maternity leave comeback
- Tennis.com: Joy — not results — brought Petra Kvitova back to tennis
- Olympics.com: Petra Kvitova announces return to tennis competition after maternity break
- Tennis.com: Mother's Day — Tennis moms open up about life beyond the court
- Olympics.com: Osaka, Wozniacki, Kerber and Svitolina lead eight mothers in Australian Open draw
- Hello Magazine: Novak Djokovic's rarest photos of children Stefan and Tara
- Sportskeeda: Wife Jelena on Serb's relationship with daughter Tara & son Stefan
- Olympics.com: Roger Federer's twin daughters practise at Rafael Nadal Academy
- Tennis World USA: Rafael Nadal and his wife Mery Perello welcome second son Miquel
- Essentially Sports: Caroline Wozniacki's kids comeback profile
- WTA: Belinda Bencic ranking watch
Photo: Belinda Bencic at the 2023 US Open / Hameltion / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
