St. Petersburg, FL (SportsNetwork.com) – For the sixth time in her brilliant career, world No. 1 Serena Williams has been voted the WTA Player of the Year.<\/p>\n
The 33-year-old Williams closed out her up-and-down year by winning 26 of her last 29 matches. She cleared seven titles, including her 18th Grand Slam championship at the U.S. Open, which moved her into a three-way tie with Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova for second place on that Open Era list.<\/p>\n
Williams also titled in Brisbane, Miami, Rome, Stanford, Cincinnati and at the WTA Finals in Singapore and held the No. 1 ranking for the entire year.<\/p>\n
She went 52-8 for the year, including an outstanding 12-1 record against top-10 opposition, and was voted Player of the Year for a third straight time.<\/p>\n
Williams is one of only three players to ever garner Player of the Year honors more than twice. Steffi Graf won it eight times and Navratilova was s seven- time winner. Serena also won the award in 2002, 2008, 2009, 2012, and 2013.<\/p>\n
Williams captured the media voting with 36-of-58 votes, but came in second to world No. 3 Simona Halep in fan voting. Halep won 48 percent of the vote, with Williams coming in second at 21 percent.<\/p>\n
The WTA Newcomer of the Year was 17-year-old Swiss Belinda Bencic; the Most Improved Player of the Year was Wimbledon runner-up Eugenie Bouchard; the Comeback Player of the Year was 32-year-old Croat Mirjana Lucic-Baroni; and the Doubles Team of the Year was Italy’s Sara Errani and Roberta Vinci.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
St. Petersburg, FL (SportsNetwork.com) – For the sixth time in her brilliant career, world No. 1 Serena Williams has been voted the WTA Player of the Year. The 33-year-old Williams closed out her up-and-down year by winning 26 of her last 29 matches. She cleared seven titles, including her 18th Grand Slam championship at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[248],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26110,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26109\/revisions\/26110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}