Veronika Erjavec reached the final of the WTA 125 tournament in Huizhou, China, and in doing so secured the best ranking of her career. On Sunday, she was due to play Poland’s Katarzyna Kawa for the title, with Rome qualifying set to begin on Monday.
The result put Erjavec in that awkward professional-tennis space where a player can be celebrating one of the biggest weeks of her career while also watching the clock. She said she had emailed the WTA office to explain her position and that the earliest she could get to Rome was 14:00 on Monday, after a final that was expected to start around 9:00 a.m. local time in Huizhou.
That made the logistics especially tight because Erjavec is entered in qualifying for a WTA 1000 tournament in Rome. Hangzhou airport is about two hours away from Huizhou by car, leaving her with only a narrow window to get from the China final to her next assignment. Before the next major event of the season, she is also scheduled to play in Parma in another WTA 125 event.
Erjavec and coach Sašo Pistotnik chose to play in China for a second consecutive year, a decision shaped by scheduling and by the same kind of travel pressure that has followed them before. The pair had previously won in Changsha and Huizhou in September last year, a reminder that the stop in China has brought both results and complications.
Pistotnik said there was never a perfect plan. When they started working together four years ago, he said, they were literally living in a car. He said they sometimes chased tournaments with overnight drives, and now they do it with overnight flights. The setup has changed, but the trade-off remains the same: chase points and results, then race to the next event.
For Erjavec, the Huizhou run is more than another final. It has pushed her into the best WTA ranking of her career, somewhere between 75th and 90th place, and it has done so while she is still trying to keep the rest of her schedule intact. The question now is not whether she has earned the ranking move. It is whether the calendar will let her use it.
