Anna Kalinskaya ready to take a step forward

Making the most of the points lost by Marta Kostyuk and Magda Linette, Anna Kalinskaya will in all likelihood make her return to the Top 30 of the WTA’s free rankings next Monday, and is ready to take another step forward ahead of the tournaments in Madrid and Rome, which will lead to the season’s queen competition on clay, Roland Garros in Paris.
The Moscow-based tennis player is fresh off a pair of tournaments played very close to her current base of operations, Florida: in Miami, which of the ‘Sunshine State’ is the main metropolis, Kalinskaya was defeated in the round of 16 by Jessica Pegula, then a finalist, while in Charleston, in neighboring South Carolina, she climbed all the way to the quarters, beating Madison Keys (Australian Open winner) in the previous round and stopping ahead of Sofia Kenin, also a tournament finalist.
Good feelings, then, for the 1998 class athlete, who after Charleston decided to take a break to recharge her batteries and face the tournaments in Europe in the best condition. The goal remains to at least return to the Top 15, perhaps reaching that Top 10 that in 2024 was only touched upon, with the achievement of the 11th place.
The other major milestone Kalinskaya hopes to achieve this year is victory in a major circuit tournament. In fact, there are two finals reached in her career at the WTA level from 250 and up, both in 2024, which ended in defeat: in Dubai the Russian lost to Jasmine Paolini, who was able to come back from a set down, while in Berlin her executioner was Jessica Pegula, also after losing the first set.