Every grass season produces a name that wasn’t on the marquee in May. This year it is Iva Jovic. The 18-year-old American reached the semifinals of the HSBC Championships on Friday by beating second seed and 2025 Queen’s finalist Amanda Anisimova 6-2, 3-6, 6-3 — her first career win over a top-five opponent.
The victory was more than a single upset. Jovic arrived at the All England Club’s west-London neighbour having lost all four of her previous matches against top-five players; against a compatriot she had never faced, she flipped that record on a surface still new to her professional CV. The win sent her into a fourth tour-level semifinal of 2026, after earlier runs in Auckland, Hobart and Charleston — a breadth of form, across hard courts and now grass, that marks her as more than a one-surface prospect.
The trajectory. Jovic’s name first surfaced to grass-watchers a year ago, when she won the Lexus Ilkley Open as a teenager finding her feet on the lawns. The leap from a 125-level title to a WTA 500 final four, against established tour names, is the kind of step that reframes a season. Her three-set pattern against Anisimova — racing the first, weathering the second, reasserting in the third — suggested a competitor comfortable solving problems mid-match rather than simply out-hitting opponents.
What’s next. Jovic will play the winner of Emma Raducanu’s rescheduled quarter-final against Kamilla Rakhimova for a place in Sunday’s final, with Katie Boulter and Donna Vekić contesting the other semifinal. Whatever the outcome, the week has already moved Jovic’s story forward, days before a Wimbledon main draw that will now look at her differently.
For a tour constantly scanning for its next contenders, Jovic’s London run is a data point worth filing: a teenager who can win on grass, close out a top-five name, and do it in front of a crowd that came to watch someone else.
