Taylor Townsend reaches US Open fourth round again, draws Sabalenka next

Taylor Townsend has spent most of her career being introduced as a doubles player who also plays singles. For the second September in a row, the U.S. Open is making that description harder to sustain. The unseeded American rallied past 15th-seeded Diana Shnaider in three sets on Friday night at Flushing Meadows, 6-2, 6-7 (3), 6-3, to reach the fourth round for the second straight year. Waiting for her there is a task of a different order: world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, the two-time defending champion, in a first career meeting between the two.

The third-round match took 2 hours and 27 minutes and swung on a familiar pattern for Townsend, who has built her singles game around a serve that even she has taken to calling absurd. She won the opener comfortably, lost her grip on the second set when Shnaider erased a 5-3 deficit to force a tiebreak, then closed out the decider by winning the last three games. It was the kind of match that could have unraveled for a player without her recent history of shaking off a lost set and resetting.

The numbers

Townsend won 69 percent of her first-serve points and hit 39 winners against 30 unforced errors, converting five of eight break points and coming to the net 44 times, a volume more common in doubles than in the modern baseline-heavy WTA singles game. She is 30 years old, unseeded, and currently ranked outside the top 75 in singles, a contrast with a doubles resume that includes 16 tour titles and three major championships since 2024. Sabalenka, for her part, dropped Kamilla Rakhimova 6-3, 6-4 earlier the same day, a result that stretched her winning streak at this tournament to 16 matches across three years, a run that includes back-to-back titles in 2024 and 2025.

From a wildcard denial to doubles No. 1

Townsend's road to Flushing Meadows has been unusual even by tennis standards. As the top-ranked junior girl in the country in 2012, she was denied a wildcard into that year's U.S. Open singles qualifying after the United States Tennis Association told her family she needed to improve her fitness, a decision that drew national criticism and that Patrick McEnroe, then the USTA's player-development chief, later attributed to a "long-term health" concern rather than punishment. She played the girls' event on her mother's dime and won the girls' doubles title that same fortnight. The episode has followed her career since, cited by players and commentators as an early, public example of body scrutiny applied unevenly to Black athletes.

The singles path she has taken since has run largely through doubles success. She reached world No. 1 in that discipline in July 2025 and owns three Grand Slam doubles titles, all won alongside Katerina Siniakova, at the 2024 Wimbledon Championships, the 2025 Australian Open and this year's French Open. Her singles career has been slower to develop by comparison; her career-high ranking of No. 46 came only in August 2024, and last year's run to the U.S. Open fourth round was her first appearance in the second week of a major in singles.

She began working with coach Roger Tyzzer in March, an arrangement conducted largely by video call between Australia and Atlanta before the two met in person for the first time at the French Open. Townsend has credited the collaboration with simplifying her thinking on court rather than adding to it. "I literally had to let all that go and just say, 'Taylor, just go and play,'" she said afterward, describing the current stretch as among the freest tennis she has played.

Who else is affected

Her run is part of a broader American push into the tournament's second week, a group that on the same day included Tommy Paul's five-set escape against Alexander Bublik and Frances Tiafoe's straight-set win over Valentin Vacherot, along with Emma Navarro's upset of seventh-seeded Karolina Muchova. For a U.S. Open desperate for home success beyond its headline names, Townsend's serve-and-volley variety has become one of the more unlikely storylines of the fortnight, and a deep run would add to a rare weekend of depth for the American contingent.

For Sabalenka, the immediate stakes are different: a third consecutive U.S. Open singles title would make her the first woman to complete that run since Serena Williams' three-peat from 2012 through 2014, and the first repeat champion at the tournament of any kind since Williams won in 2014. Nothing about Friday's draw changes that trajectory on paper, but it does hand her an opponent with a game plan unlike almost anyone else left in the field.

Reaction and what happens next

After beating Rakhimova, Sabalenka spoke about the value of opponents who make her work rather than folding early. "I love when they bring their best tennis because they really push me to improve," she said of a second set in which Rakhimova saved four break points before finally succumbing.

"I'm excited. I feel like I thrive in these moments... I'm built for these moments," Townsend said of facing the top seed.

Townsend has never played Sabalenka, which removes any head-to-head history from the equation and leaves both players working from scouting reports rather than lived experience against each other. Her net game and left-handed slice present a different look than most players Sabalenka has faced on her way through the draw, though the power gap between the two is real and well documented on tour, and oddsmakers have installed Sabalenka as a heavy favorite.

The fourth-round match is expected to be scheduled for this weekend at Flushing Meadows, with a place in the quarterfinals at stake. A win would be the deepest major run of Townsend's singles career and would arrive one year after her breakthrough trip to the same round. For Sabalenka, the match is one obstacle in a path that, should she keep winning, would end with a bid for a piece of U.S. Open history still held solely by Williams. Beyond this single match, Townsend's continued presence in the draw adds another name to a U.S. Open where American players, after years of frustration in singles at their home major, have advanced deep into the tournament in unusually large numbers this year.