Saudi Tennis Star Yara Alhogbani on Success Stories, Future Goals, and Her Hopes for Her Homeland
The 19-year-old Pro athlete – a new generation tennis talent from the burgeoning sports arena of KSA – sits down with Bazaar Saudi to share insight on how she started; the importance of family support and her desires to inspire others to pick up a racket
It’s 8am in Paris, and tennis star Yara Alhogbani has been awake for hours already, she looks fresh-faced and is dressed in a navy training kit with a matching visor and a pulled back ponytail, she tucks into a jar of chocolate spread as she chats. The Taylor Swift fan, “I’m not quite a Swiftie but I really like her music,” is an early bird at heart, thanks partly to her rigorous training schedule of four to six hours a day – that’s “three hours of tennis, one hour of fitness and then two of stretching and mobility,” but it doesn’t mean the 19-year-old doesn’t love sleeping in.
“Oh 9am isn’t a lay in, you need to stay in bed until 11am at least, do it properly,” she laughs when we discuss the early call time of our chat. The laughter sets the tone for the interview and is an immediate insight into Yara’s vibrant, fun personality, she’s easily relaxed around new people and confident in getting her voice heard, which probably comes from years of practice as the youngest of eight siblings.
That’s not to say she isn’t considered and humble too, and of course professional when she needs to swing into action on the tennis court. Yara has won over 50 United States Tennis Association (USTA) tournaments, she went pro in 2019 and became the first GCC and Saudi Arabian competitor to win a professional juniors tournament when she won both the singles and doubles International Tennis Federation finals in Bahrain in 2022, she also won the same doubles title in Romania. Yara became the first Saudi Arabian female tennis player to compete at the Asian Games last December and was also part of the first Saudi mixed doubles pair with her older brother Ammar, and this February she took the next step in her career when she headed to Abu Dhabi as a wild card to become the first Saudi to play in the Women’s Tennis Association Tour (WTA 500).
“I feel so privileged to be playing tennis, it doesn’t even feel like a job,” gushes Yara, who loves watching game shows and comedy sitcom Friends on repeat. “I read somewhere that the difference between a job and a career is that a job is something you’re doing to pay your bills and a career is something that you enjoy doing, but I don’t even know how to call this my career because, I’m not just enjoying it, I feel like it’s my escape from everything. I get asked all the time: ‘what would you do if not tennis?’ And, I literally cannot tell you.”
Yara’s journey to tennis professional is not a conventional one, her Saudi parents moved from The Kingdom to Ohio in the USA a few years before she was born in 2004, coming into a family of six older brothers and an older sister, her parents were keen to keep the children busy, and had them playing a year-round rotation of sports, with tennis fitting into the Spring months.
“My dad has always pushed our family to be very active, whether it’s biking, tennis or soccer, my whole family has played tennis at some point,” explains Yara, whose older brothers Ammar and Saud are also tennis players. “My dad would just encourage us to be out of the house so that when we got home, we’d be knocked out and easy to sleep.”
Yara’s own love affair with the game began when she just four-years-old, happy playing ball girl as her brothers practiced with her father. “I used to have my little bike that I rode around the court and I would pick up balls and put them in the back of my little basket, filling up the basket – my dad made it seem like it was such a fun job,” she laughs. “But then one day, my Dad said: ‘okay Yara, your turn’. I’d never had the chance to play before, so It felt like a privilege. So, I played with him and it was super fun and I never looked back.”
After playing for fun for years, around the age of 12, Yara started taking tennis seriously and “I decided that I wanted to do it professionally,” she recalls. She has been on an upward trajectory ever since and credits being surrounded by her family, who she moved to Riyadh with in 2019, as the key to her success. Sister Haya, is acting as an interim agent alongside working a communications job in Riyadh, and despite the ten-year age gap, Yara counts her as her best friend: “I like to call her the better version of myself, she’s someone that I try to emulate in every possible way.”
Yara is often on the road with her two tennis player brothers and also brother Abdulrahman, who is a certified tennis coach and her hitting partner, “It’s great having them around, apart from then they’re messing around and being like, “oh my god, don’t play with us, you suck,” she laughs. And of course there’s her parents, who are keeping all these kids in check. “My parents have definitely set aside their own goals to help me travel to tournaments, my dad spent six months with me in Majorca just so he could make me home-cooked meals of chicken and rice and also my favourite, which is pasta and lamb,” she says. “So, it’s definitely a lot of sacrifice, I know it’s an individual sport, but behind the scenes, you really need a lot of people to help you out. When I was younger, I would I would see other girls my age, or even younger, and they would be there alone and they would always tell me how lucky I am. And I always knew it. I wasn’t the kind of person that took it for granted.”
Alongside gaining traction in the tennis world, Yara has also found herself with a growing fanbase off the court, there’s the 185K followers on Instagram and the young fans, and their parents, who approach her after games and training sessions to ask for advice and the odd selfie. At just 19 herself, and describing herself as “part of the TikTok generation who doesn’t have the attention span for movies,” does it feel odd to be a role model?
“It’s definitely a responsibility that I am very privileged to have, but it’s hard when you’re growing up because you can’t really make as many mistakes as an average person would – when you’re young, you’re bound to say something silly in an interview, or it come out the wrong way,” explains Yara, who counts Rafael Nadal and Naomi Osaka as her own tennis role models, still getting starstruck when she sees them. “I just want to open the path for other [Saudi girls], I don’t want to just be like ‘this is what they can amount to’ I want it to be that they can make it even further than me.”
It’s an important time for tennis in The Kingdom as a whole, the Next Gen ATP Finals were held in Jeddah last December, the first time a traditional tennis tournament had been staged in Saudi Arabia, the same month also saw the Riyadh Season Tennis Cup with some of the world’s best players including Novak Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz, Aryna Sabalenka and Ons Jabeur competing, and most importantly, the announcement that the WTA Finals, the season finale of the women’s tour, will take place in Riyadh for the next three years.
“Having that professional level of tournaments here is important, it’s one thing to watch it on TV, but to see it in real life. It’s definitely a different experience,” says Yara, who hopes it will encourage more people in the Kingdom to take up the sport. “The WTA Final is the eight best players in the world, but I think it’s also important to give a wild card to a Saudi player so, Saudi’s can see someone that looks like them and talks like them on the court playing with these professionals. They can then imagine themselves doing it.”
Yara is passionate about her country’s future in the sport, and alongside her personal dreams to be successful, she’s hopeful that Saudi Arabia will breed future tennis stars. “I know it’s an expensive sport to take on and I’d like for people to have access to it, whether it’s courts, facilities, sporting events or panels,” she shares.
“Being around my brothers, made it easy for me to pick up a tennis racket, so for other people, I definitely want there to be tennis communities and academies all over Saudi, where they can be around people who have the same ideas and have the same goals. I’m excited about Saudi’s future when it comes to tennis.”
Lead image credits: Joséphine Duo Eternel Earrings in White Gold with Diamonds; Joséphine Aigrette Watch in White Gold with Diamonds; From index finger: Joséphine Aigrette Ring in White Gold with Diamonds; Joséphine Aigrette Rings in Rose Gold with Diamonds, POA, all Chaumet Top, SAR3,850; Skirt, SAR6,400, both Brunello Cucinelli. Shoes, SAR1,450, Celine. Tights; Socks, both Stylist’s own
Photography: Amer Mohamad. Creative Direction: Nour Bou Ezz. Styling: Seher Khan. Make-Up Artist: Remsha Beauty. Hair: Ferdose Mohammed Mahmoud. Senior Producer: Steff Hawker. Styling Assistants: Jawaher Aldokheel & Florence Webber Special thanks to Core Social Wellness Club, Riyadh
From Harper’s Bazaar Saudi’s Summer 2024 issue.