In ‘Challengers,’ A ‘Junior Curse’ Looms Large. It Happens In Real Life, Too
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In the first of many flashbacks in Challengers, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) are transfixed as they watch Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) play. She serves ace after ace. Her groundstrokes cause a weaker opponent to tire herself out on the court. By the end of the match, she doesn’t have a single strand of her braid out of place.
Tashi easily wins the film’s fictional 2006 US Open girls’ singles tournament. But the junior Grand Slam is where her career peaks. Soon, she’s knocked out of tennis entirely, thanks to a devastating knee injury.
The same goes for Patrick: After squeaking out a win against Art during the boys’ tournament, he’s left with a middling pro resume, ultimately fighting for a wildcard spot in the Open by the movie’s end. Both characters are left on the outside of the tennis world, struggling to break in.
In real life, it's a surprisingly common fate for junior Slam winners. There are plenty of athletes that don’t go on to become the next Serena Williams—take a look at the list yourself and see how many names you know.
“There is a bit of a junior curse,” Brad Gilbert, Zendaya’s trainer (and Coco Gauff’s real-life coach), tells Women’s Health. “There are quite a few junior Wimbledon champions that never made it. That was a narrative [in the film].”
But for many players, it’s psychological pressure that takes them out, not an injury or an outsized ego (as in the case of Tashi and Patrick). Some, like 2011 Wimbledon girls’ champ Ashleigh Barty, take leaves of absence to cope with the expectations that can come with winning a big junior tournament. Others, like Noppawan Lertcheewakarn (who won the Wimbledon girls’ title in 2009), leave the tennis world altogether. In 2018, Noppawan was in training to become a police officer, per the New York Times.
“I can relate to all these young players who have really outstanding junior careers,” Meilen Tu, who won the 1994 girls’ US Open tournament, tells Women’s Health. “It's just a really hard transition because you expect to win [when you turn pro], and it is totally different.”
Meet the experts: Mehak Chopra, DO, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, who specializes in treating athletes. Simon Briggs, a longtime tennis correspondent for The Telegraph. Meilen Tu, a former WTA player and US Open girls' champion. Brad Gilbert, a former ATP player and current coach of Coco Gauff. Jennifer Maynard, MD, the WTA's chief medical officer.
Meilen turned pro shortly after she won the junior Slam (the same tournament where Venus Williams made her debut). But Meilen, a California native, felt a need to keep the momentum going, thanks to her big US Open win.
“A few months later, I had a match point on center court at Indian Wells, against the same girl that I beat in my second pro tournament. I lost, in my home state,” she recalled. “You’re 16, and you’re just shattered. You’re like, ‘Oh my God, this never happened to me in juniors.’”
The pressure can cause performance anxiety.
Triumph feels good, on a chemical level. “There is a dopamine rush when they win these titles,” says Mehak Chopra, DO, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, who specializes in treating athletes. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter linked to the brain’s reward center, which produces that happy, glow-y feeling after a huge victory.
And when that feeling is gone, you crave it again and again, per CBS News.
“It's a lot to deal with,” Dr. Chopra says, adding that the pressure to keep winning is also “self-esteem-oriented.”
“It gives them satisfaction to know that they’ve pushed their body. They want to continue to compete and win more,” she says.
Many previously-dominant competitors can’t deal with the mental pressure, she adds. They get performance anxiety during subsequent matches, causing their rankings to sink lower and lower. Many players “freeze” when they compete, she says, thinking about the expectations of family and fans, instead of the game in front of them.
And despite teams of coaches, family members, psychiatrists, and more, tennis is an individual sport, meaning the pressure is ratcheted up even more for young athletes. “Your coaches are there to give you the tools, but they can't hold the racket for you when you're on the court,” Meilen explains. “Your biggest opponent is yourself.”
Loneliness is common on tour.
Tennis is a mental game, but not exactly in the way that many imagine. For players who win junior tournaments and turn pro, there’s a difficult adjustment.
“It's not just even a mental game, as in, who's going to play well on break points? It's a mental game as in, how are you going to handle being stuck in Madrid in a hotel room for five nights?” Simon Briggs, a longtime tennis correspondent for The Telegraph, says. “You can't predict that from junior results.”
After having traveled with their parents as juniors, many pros embark on the men’s ATP or women’s WTA tours alone, causing increased feelings of loneliness, he says.
“It's that moment where you've got to fly solo. You don't know until you do it, whether or not you can hack it,” Briggs continues. “It's not necessarily how good your forehand is. It's how you cope with the lifestyle.”
Life on the tour isn’t easy, even for the strongest competitors. Athletes lose constantly, with only one out of 110 or 128 players taking the crown each week. Schedules vary wildly, depending on a player’s wins or losses. And it’s a massive time commitment: WTA players are now required to participate in at least 16 tour events, the major Slams, and possibly the WTA finals each year, according to the New York Times.
When Meilen turned pro after her juniors win, she dealt with a similar adjustment period. “Absolutely, I was lonely,” she says.
At the time, she was the youngest person on the tour, and many of her peers kept to themselves. But she made three close friends, who were more than eight years her senior and took her under their wing. “I was pretty lucky,” she reflects.
Touring can be especially difficult for female players, Briggs says. From what he’s observed, “It's a lot more acceptable in the modern world to have a partner who is your traveling companion when you're a guy.” Plus, a player must be ranked highly to even mix with the other tour: only players who are ranked 30th or lower are typically invited to combined men’s and women’s events, Briggs says.
Issues with the tennis lifestyle aren’t new: Naomi Osaka put them in the spotlight when she withdrew from the French Open in 2021, citing her struggles with depression and anxiety. Since then, many more players—including Maria Sakkari, Danielle Collins, and more—have been open about their mental health.
The WTA has increased available mental health resources over the past few years.
There are ways to get around the mental block that many juniors face. Dr. Chopra recommends that athletes see a sports psychiatrist before anxiety issues get bad, so the practitioner and the patient can develop a baseline. Using talk therapy, sports psychiatrists can address lifestyle issues and what she calls a “performance gap:” the space between what athletes want to do, and what they currently can’t do.
“Proactive treatment of mental health issues is really important, so don’t wait until signs come up,” she says. “They can help themselves without it affecting their career.”
The WTA is taking more aggressive measures to address players’ wellbeing, too. The association has offered psychiatric services to players for more than 20 years, but it recently added four mental healthcare providers to their roster in 2022, according to the New York Times. Their services include “managing the mental and emotional challenges of match play, handling finances, and transitioning to life after tennis,” per the outlet.
Mental health professionals work at every tournament along the tour, the WTA’s chief medical advisor Jennifer Maynard, MD, told WH during the 2024 Miami Open. They’re in the same rooms where players visit massage therapists and physios after a match, and athletes can book 30- or 60-minute sessions every day, according to the WTA. Athletes are also able to communicate with the professionals in between tournaments, the tour says.
Ultimately, Meilen won one singles title and four doubles titles in her professional career, nabbing a career-high ranking of 35 and retiring in 2010 after a 16-year professional career. She’s now an agent with Topnotch Management, a boutique agency where she represents a handful of elite tennis players, and is married with two children.
After her experience going pro, she always warns her young clients that there will be a “dip” in their careers. “Everything's going great now, but there will be that down time,” she says.
But she knows their hard work will ultimately pay off. “Tennis has brought me so much in my life: how I am as a person, my job, my role as a mother,” she says. “I’ve persevered through so many things personally, and if I didn’t have that experience of persevering as a tennis player, I wouldn’t be the same.”
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