Currently at Wimbledon this week, 21-year-old Alexandra Eala walks onto the court of the All England as the first Filipina ever to be seeded at the tournament. The Filipino player opened her 2026 campaign at SW19 with a straight-sets win over Mexico’s Renata Zarazua, 6-1, 6-2, needing just over an hour to close it out. “I know how notoriously difficult it is to get tickets to this event, so to have what I would call a full house of almost all Filipinos is amazing,” she said afterward. “I never would have thought that at Wimbledon I would have like a home crowd, so [I’m] super thankful.”
Eala now advances to face Australia’s Maya Joint in the second round on July 2, an anticipated rematch after Joint beat Eala in her maiden WTA final at Eastbourne last year. Eala has called the Eastbourne match “epic” and states that she’s looking to fix what went wrong the first time around.
From Pasig To Manocor
Her story began on the courts of Valle Verde Country Club, where her grandfather, Roberto Maniego, handed a four-year-old Alex a racket nearly her own size and who had no formal coaching background beyond what he picked up from tennis magazines. “I was coached by my grandfather for the first 10 years of my career. From 3.5 to 13 years old, it was him, and I was training every day with my brother. Despite passing away before seeing her turn pro, Eala states that she thinks of him at her biggest milestones. At just 12 years old, Eala won Les Petits As in Tarbes, France, where she became the first wild card champion in the tournament’s history. The result caught the attention of the Rafa Nadal Academy, a tennis sports camp and international school based in Manacor, Spain, wherein they offered her a scholarship.
At age 13, Eala left her home in order to train full-time under tennis coach Daniel Gomez, with veteran coach Joan Bosch later joining her team, balancing schoolwork with a regimen built around recovery, strategy, and matches against Europe’s best juniors. Graduating in 2023, her diploma was presented in person by Nadal, with Iga Swiatek attending as a guest of honor, but by then she had already made junior history, winning the 2022 US Open girls’ singles title as the first Filipina to claim a junior Grand Slam crown.
The Run That Introduced Alexandra Eala To The World
If the tennis world outside the Philippines needed an introduction to Alexandra Eala, it came at the 2025 Miami Open. Handed a wild card and ranked outside the world’s top 140, Eala beat three Grand Slam champions in succession, Jelena Ostapenko, Madison Keys, and Iga Swiatek, to reach the semifinals, marking history for Philippine tennis by becoming the first Filipino to reach a WTA 1000 semifinal and the first to enter the world’s top 100. Toni Nadal himself sat in her box for the win over Swiatek.
A New Era For Philippine Tennis
The Filipino star currently carries a career-high ranking of world No. 29, achieved in March 2026, and has already banked wins over Rybakina, Swiatek, Keys, and Ostapenko, a resume most players twice her age have not assembled, another entry in a career that keeps rewriting what Philippine tennis has been, especially for a country with little tennis infrastructure and fewer role models in the sport. Eala has already done something rarer than any single result: she made the rest of the world start paying attention.
