How Wimbledon 2025 Was Drawn Up
Friday's draw ceremony traced out tough paths for several Wimbledon contenders, including Sabalenka and Draper.
WIMBLEDON, England — Wimbledon has plenty of style elsewhere, but their draw ceremony is all substance.
Instead of the hype videos, player interviews, celebrity cameos, and assorted padding and prattling that takes up time elsewhere, Wimbledon cuts to the chase, getting straight into the action with minimal small talk, which makes it the favorite of everyone with whom I’ve ever discussed the topic.
But once they get going, nothing is rushed: Wimbledon places each of the 128 names in the draw individually, which is a boon for transparency compared to the computer generated fields elsewhere. This also gives those in attendance a beat to process each first-round matchup as it’s created.
The entire production isn’t quicker than how the other Grand Slam events handle it overall, but it’s all steak, no sizzle, and there are some meaty matchups ahead.
Top Heavy
The most striking section, as it happened, was the very first one filled in on Friday morning:
Wimbledon started with the women, and the first unseeded player placed in the ladies’ singles draw, to face top-seeded Aryna Sabalenka, was yesterday’s Bounces subject Carson Branstine.
“It would be great to play a big name or something; I'd love to play on Centre Court or something,” Branstine told me yesterday, manifesting what came true about 18 hours later.
Remarkably, this makes it three draws in a row now that Branstine has been slotted to face the No. 1 seed in her first round. In the last two, she pulled off the upset, beating top-seeded Liudmila Samsonova in the first round of WTA 250 ‘s-Hertogenbosch, and qualifying top seed Loïs Boisson in Roehampton.
“Maybe one day I’ll get a good draw LOL,” Branstine tweeted as the draw was made.
World No. 1 Sabalenka is, of course, a much tougher test than anyone Branstine has ever faced, so I am very curious how that bracing confidence of hers—“there's never been one match that I played in my life—not one—where I felt like I was genuinely outplayed,” she told me—is braced for impact.
Sabalenka is a consensus favorite here, but her path isn’t easy. In the second round she could face last year’s Wimbledon quarterfinalist Lulu Sun, whose game seemed tailor-made for the grass.
In the third round, Sabalenka could face 2023 Wimbledon champion Marketa Vondrousova, who beat her last week in the WTA 500 Berlin semifinals en route to the title there. Though to get to that rematch, Vondrousova would have to first beat 32nd-seeded McCartney Kessler, who herself was a champion last weekend at WTA 250 Nottingham (so I wrote about both of them in my grass champions round-up a few days ago).
Then in the second round, the winner of Vondrousova-Kessler could face British No. 1 Emma Raducanu, who has built her way back into the Top 40.
A few other first round women’s match-ups that jumped off the page in the other 15 subsections of the women’s draw before turning to the men:
Yulia Putintseva vs. No. 13 Amanda Anisimova — two players unafraid to get feisty.
Petra Kvitova vs. No. 10 Emma Navarro — a tough draw for what two-time champion Kvitova announced will be her final Wimbledon appearance.
Alycia Parks vs. Belinda Bencic — two very different styles of fast-court tennis.
Sofia Kenin vs. Taylor Townsend — two Americans with all-court games that could lead to some very watchable tennis on grass.
Dayana Yastremska vs. No. 2 Coco Gauff — Yastremska, the runner-up to Kessler in Nottingham, is not an ideal foe for Gauff, who lost her one warm-up match to Wang Xinyu in Berlin.
Men Meeting in the Middle
There are always fewer relevant floaters in a men’s draw at a major in recent years, but the 32 boldfaced names in the men’s field stacked up in a few interesting ways during the first act of the men’s draw ceremony.
Though there isn’t an expressed demand for quiet from the gallery like there could be at, say, an old-time presidential debate, journalists are generally fairly placid—or too busy live-tweeting—to react too much as a draw ceremony unfolds.
But during the men’s side there were two moments where the silence was punctured by distinctly British sighs as undesired names popped up near Jack Draper’s.
Fourth-seeded Draper, in his first time as the high seed in a quarter of a Grand Slam draw, drew into Jannik Sinner’s top half of the men’s draw, and then landed No. 6 Novak Djokovic. Even at 38, seven-time Wimbledon champion Djokovic surely remains the most daunting of the 5-8 seeds in the draw.
There was further anguish when No. 28 Alexander Bublik, who knocked Draper out of Roland Garros and then won the stacked ATP 500 Halle title this month, landed as Draper’s projected third round opponent.
Though he is reasonably considered a contender here this year, Draper has never made it past the second round of Wimbledon in his three previous main draw appearances, so a third round run would still be a minor achievement for him here.
The seed one ahead of Draper, No. 3 Alexander Zverev, would also probably like a redo on the seeds in his path. Zverev drew a possible quarterfinal matchup against No. 5 Taylor Fritz, who has won all five of their meetings in the last 52 weeks, including a couple weeks ago in the ATP 250 Stuttgart final.
But in order to even make it to that meeting, Zverev could have to beat grass-loving Matteo Berrettini in the third round. Berrettini, the 2021 Wimbledon runner-up to Djokovic, beat Zverev in straight sets in the same round here in 2023; he also beat Zverev in the second round of ATP 1000 Monte Carlo on clay a couple months ago.
Will Their Start Even Finish?
There’s a handful of interesting men’s matches in the first round—Fritz-Mpetshi Perricard jumps out most, for me—but there’s one that caught eyes for grimmer reasons, in which the main question will be if the match is even completed.
Two very likeable and entertaining players, Grigor Dimitrov and Yoshihito Nishioka, drew each other in the first round, in a battle of reliably popular but increasingly unsturdy.
Starting in Dallas in February, Nishioka has retired from the match in five of the last eight times he took court; he also once gave a walkover during that run.
Dimitrov has held up well everywhere but where it counts most: last month in Paris he completed a surely-unprecedented non-calendar “retirement slam” of injury retirements at four majors in a row.
Hopefully both Nishioka and Dimitrov are able to stay healthy in the long-term, but the first concern is the short term until the end of this first round match.
Time Travel
One more thing to leave you with before the main event which should be a treat for fans of tennis history or nostalgia: earlier this week I was happy to publish a radio documentary by Tom Tebbutt covering all sorts of angles of his first Wimbledon visit 50 years ago.
The 1975 edition here had two culturally resonant champions—Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe—and there’s all sorts of fun candor and wild accents from the various Brits whom Tebbutt interviewed in and around the grounds, which make it quite a time capsule if you’d like to immerse into another chapter of Wimbledon history.
Thanks for reading Bounces! Please do tell your tennis-fan friends to join us here during Wimbledon! -Ben
I almost fell over when Sabalenka drew Brastine. Your recent posts have been remarkably prescient, Ben!
I've been wondering about how the draws are handled and appreciate your insight. Looking forward to your Wimbledon coverage!