by James Kent

Created on: May 17, 2010   Last Updated: May 19, 2010

To many people, Wimbledon is seen as the world’s premier tennis event. To represent this it stands to reason that the best players will be on show. There will be 64 seeds across both men and women, who will go straight into the main draw. There will also be a selection of wild cards handed out and the majority of those will go to top 100 players and up and coming British players. Those players not fortunate enough to have been seeded or selected as a wild card will have to qualify for the main draw. The qualifying competition takes place a week before the start of Wimbledon at Roehampton. The players entering the singles events must play three rounds on grass; the players who win all three rounds progress. Therefore, 16 men and 12 women progress to the main draw in the singles competition and four pairs each in the men’s and women’s doubles competition.

Between the years 1983 and 2003, The Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) held Pre-Qualifying singles events to decide which players should get through to the main Qualifying competition. However, in 2004 it was decided to abandon the Pre-Qualifying competition. It was replaced with a wild card play-off competition. In 2007, The LTA chose a number of British players to receive a wild card based on their world ranking. The players that were not chosen were put into a wild card play-off draw in order to decide who should go into the main qualification competition. A similar system will be in place for the 2010 qualification competition. Getting through to the main draw at Wimbledon is seen as an achievement in its self, but some qualifiers have gone on to excel. One such example of this occurred in 1977, when John McEnroe as an 18 year old qualifier went all the way to the semi-finals. A more recent example occurred in 2000, when Vladamir Voltchkov went through to the semi-finals despite only being a qualifier.

In 1999 two qualifiers Jelena Dokic and Alexandra Stevenson both reached the quarter-finals of the Ladies’ Singles event. They met each other and Stevenson won through to the semi-finals. She lost in the semis to eventual winner Lindsay Davenport. Hopefully this shows that even qualifiers can be threats in the latter stages of the competition. Who is to say that we won’t have a few qualifiers reach the second week of Wimbledon in the 2010 competition?

Source: http://www.wimbledon.org/en_GB/about/guide/qualifyin g.html

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