U.S. Open: The Tennis Player Emma Navarro Is Getting Someplace Fast

As speedy as Emma Navarro is on the tennis court, she is never in a rush.

By her own admission, Navarro isn’t very good at time management. But she defends herself by explaining that her most enduring trait, one of the reasons she has catapulted from playing low-level challenger tournaments to being ranked just outside the world’s top 10, is that she makes it a point to stay in the here and now.

“I’m naturally very present, which makes it hard to plan ahead,” Navarro, 23, said by video call from Toronto earlier this month. “But I think it helps with just taking one thing at a time and feeling like I’m not in any rush to be anywhere that I’m not yet.”

Navarro has been one of the biggest surprises in women’s tennis over the last 16 months. In January 2023, she was ranked 149th and playing in a $25,000 tournament in Naples, Fla., which she won. Now she is ranked 13th. She will be seeded at the U.S. Open for the first time.

Navarro has never advanced beyond the first round of the main draw at the U.S. Open and has won only one match, in the junior tournament in 2019. Last year she lost in the first round to Magdalena Frech.

She was born in New York City, and her family left Manhattan for Charleston, S.C., shortly after 9/11. It was there, at age 14, that Navarro began working with Peter Ayers, who remains her coach.