Amra Sadikovic ready for Serena Williams challenge at Wimbledon

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  • No mountain is insurmountable: Amra Sadikovic.

    Two years ago, Amra Sadikovic quit tennis because she felt she no longer enjoyed it and struggled financially to sustain her career.

    On Tuesday, the 27-year-old Swiss takes on one of the greatest players of all-time, Serena Williams, on the most iconic centre court in the sport, at the most prestigious tournament in tennis.

    Sadikovic, a Bosnian born in Macedonia, who moved with her parents to Switzerland during the war when she was young, did not drop a set through her three Wimbledon qualifying matches last week in Roehampton to reach the main draw of a grand slam for the first time in her career.

    A little over a year ago, she was coaching adults, kids and juniors at the TIF academy in Basel, having given up on her tennis dream.

    It’s fair to say that dream, today, is alive and well.

    “It’s kind of a dream coming true. You don’t get these chances every year, to play one of the best players ever, on centre court, at Wimbledon… what else? To me it’s just, I’m going to out there and fight and enjoy every single moment,” said Sadikovic.

    “There were a lot of players who told me ‘bad luck, tough draw’ and I was like ‘yeah, it is a tough draw definitely’ but I don’t look at this negatively at all. To me it’s positive, I could only win, I don’t feel pressure.”

    The daughter of a basketball player, Sadikovic decided to try her hand at tennis after watching a match between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. She went to a club close to her house in Birr and immediately started playing three times a week. She won the first club competition she ever played and she was surrounded by people who told her she was the real deal and would go places, but Sadikovic says the main problem is that she never believed it herself.

    “I really gave up on pro tennis when I was 25. In the end it was because I was on court and I didn’t enjoy it anymore. I asked myself ‘what am I doing here? I don’t want to be here’. It was also a little bit connected with money because it was not so easy to afford all of these things. My parents were not in a situation where they could afford all of this. But in the end, the last three or four months I really didn’t enjoy it on court anymore,” she said.

    “I don’t regret it. It was the best decision I ever made.”

    She didn’t play a professional match between May 2014 and June 2015.

    “After a while I started missing competition, when you turn on the TV and you see the players playing the grand slams and you beat them before. It hurts,” said Sadikovic, who had posted wins over the likes of Eugenie Bouchard before deciding to quit.

    Upon her return to tennis, Sadikovic immediately posted good results, lifting herself to her current career-high ranking of 148.

    She wanted to make sure she came back strong so people would take her comeback seriously. Any hesitation she had about returning to the game vanished when she saw how her compatriot Timea Bacsinszky came back from her hiatus to go on and enter the top-10 and make the French Open semi-finals.

    “I’m happy I have really the best family I can have, they supported me in every step. Even my sister and her husband they said ‘if you need money, we’ll help you out, just go and do your thing’. Because I didn’t reach my potential,” she says.

    “People they told me ‘you have a game, you can be top-100’ but it was me, I didn’t believe, I was not like 100 per cent convinced that I could make it. And now that’s a totally different story.”

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