2010 US Open Wheelchair Competition Returns
August 9, 2010
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — The USTA announced today the field for the 2010 US Open Wheelchair Competition. The event, in its fifth year, will be held September 9-12 at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, N.Y. The competition will feature 20 of the top wheelchair tennis athletes from around the globe.
The 2010 US Open Wheelchair Competition will feature a Men’s, Women’s and Quad Division, and will include six events: men’s singles, men’s doubles, women’s singles, women’s doubles, quad singles and quad doubles. The top seven ranked players to enter (according to the July 26 ITF Rankings) and one wild card were selected on both the men’s and women’s sides. The top three ranked quad players to enter and one wild card were selected. The total purse for the event will be $100,000, the highest total prize money offered by any of the Grand Slam wheelchair events.
This year’s field will feature the four-time and defending women’s singles champion Esther Vergeer, of the Netherlands, who will be honored during the US Open’s Opening Night Ceremony on Monday, August 30, and will look to continue her unbeaten streak of 391 consecutive match wins. The field also will feature defending men’s singles champion Shingo Kunieda, of Japan, who lost just four games in three US Open matches last year, two-time men’s singles champion (2005-06) Robin Ammerlaan, of the Netherlands, and two-time defending Quad singles champion Peter Norfolk, of Great Britain. To classify as a Quad competitor, a player must have substantial loss of function in one or both lower extremities and one or both upper extremities.
The United States will be represented in singles and doubles by the two-time Paralympic Quad doubles gold medalists David Wagner (Hillsboro, Ore.) and Nick Taylor (Wichita, Kan.). Other Americans include 18-year-old Mackenzie Soldan (Louisville, Ky.), the No. 1 American female player, who will compete in the women’s singles and doubles events, and Jon Rydberg (Oakdale, Minn.), a two-time Paralympian, who will compete in the men’s singles and doubles.
The USTA was officially designated by the USOC as the national governing body for the Paralympic sport of wheelchair tennis in June 2002, becoming the first Olympic national governing body to earn this recognition. As the national governing body for wheelchair tennis, the USTA manages wheelchair tennis in the United States, including the development of local programming, the sanctioning of tournaments, overseeing wheelchair rankings, creating and managing a High Performance program for developing elite disabled athletes, and selecting teams to compete internationally for the United States.