It has been a whirlwind year for Maya Joint. Twelve months ago, the teenager made her Tour-level debut at the US Open, her first real taste of the limelight, just two years after switching allegiance from the United States to Australia.
Her shock first-round win over Germany’s Laura Siegemund earned her a clash with Madison Keys and though she was well-beaten, Joint drew extra attention due to her status as a college player, which meant she could receive only a fraction of her $140,000 prize money, rules that are currently the subject of a class action lawsuit in the US.
For a shy 18-year-old, the attention was understandably tough to deal with. “I wasn’t used to it,” Joint says. “I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was pretty nervous coming into any interview and I didn’t really know how to answer most of the questions, but I think I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable.”
A recent media training course put on by the WTA, has also helped. “I definitely needed it,” she says. “It was just more about confidence building and knowing what to say and what not to say.”
Joint’s rise has been meteoric. Ranked 684 at the start of 2024, she was already up to No 135 when last year’s US Open began. Since turning professional at the end of 2024, she has won two WTA Tour titles and goes into this year’s event ranked No 43. Her first win in Rabat was a joyous moment but her second title, on grass in Eastbourne, proved to her that it wasn’t a fluke.
“It was crazy because before that tournament I wasn’t really feeling very confident on grass with my movement,” she said. “I was just like, ah, grass maybe isn’t really my surface, it’s hard to move, it’s hard to do anything on here. Then I had a couple good wins on it (including one over Emma Raducanu), and I thought, oh wow. People did tell me that my game was suited for grass, but I was like, ah, I don’t know. And then it just kept going. It was an amazing tournament. With the first title, I thought, oh, I could be lucky, I had a good draw. But then the second title, I felt like, oh, that’s really cool.”
It could be argued that Joint has already overcome the biggest challenge she will ever face. At the age of 16, she made the bold decision to switch allegiance from the United States to Australia, making the leap from Michigan to Brisbane. Thanks to her father, the former professional squash player, Michael Joint, representing Australia was always an option but not one the family had really considered until that point.
“We never really talked about it that seriously,” Joint says. “It was always like, oh, what if I played for Australia? That would have been cool. I was with the USTA a little bit at that time, and then I wasn’t with the USTA anymore, I was just with a private coach. I wasn’t really getting the training that I needed, so we thought we’d reach out to Australia and see if they could help in any way.”
Relying only on what her father said about the country, Joint then joined up with many other young players at Australia’s National Tennis Academy in Brisbane. “I went there for two weeks as kind of a trial to see how everything was, and I really liked it,” she says. “The first couple of weeks were definitely very difficult. I was not used to being that far away from family, the time difference, everything was very new. But I had so many good friends there, and they really made me feel like I was at home.”
The decision by Daria Kasatkina to switch her allegiance from Russia to Australia earlier this year has undoubtedly taken some pressure off Joint, who now has someone to share the burden with. More importantly for her, she also has a new, famous, friend. “It’s really nice to have another Aussie,” she said. “I didn’t know her at all before and now I talk to her sometimes, and I’m like, oh my God, I know Daria Kasatkina. She’s a really great person.”
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Now 19, Joint plays Victoria Jimenez Kasintseva, a qualifier from Andorra, in round one in New York on Tuesday, having made the main draw by ranking for the third straight major. Though she lost in round one in Australia, Paris and at Wimbledon, there are high hopes for Joint in New York. Having broken into the top 50, it would be easy for her to start setting lofty goals for the rest of the year, but she is determined not to obsess about rankings.
“Every day in practice we are just trying to get a little bit better at something,” she says. “And even if you’re not playing well that day, then [it’s about] trying to get better at something mentally. I think looking at ranking can be pretty stressful, so just understanding that it’s going to go up and it’s going to go down is healthy, I think.”
Having studied psychology at the University of Texas, Joint is also probably better equipped than most to deal with the craziness of the tennis circuit and especially the abuse many players have experienced on social media. “I just kind of click past the comments,” she says.
