While the tour argues over seedings in Toronto and Montreal, two places in the US Open main draw are being decided this week by players who are not ranked, not paid and in most cases not yet out of high school. The USTA Boys’ 18 and 16 National Championships began Friday in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and run through Aug. 16 across Stowe Stadium at Kalamazoo College and the courts of Western Michigan University.
The event has been held there for 82 years and draws close to 500 juniors. The USTA Billie Jean King Girls’ 16s and 18s National Championships open Saturday at the Barnes Tennis Center in San Diego, with the 18s draw starting Sunday and both titles decided on Aug. 16. What is at stake is unusual. The 18s singles champion at each site receives a wild card straight into the US Open main draw, not into qualifying.
The doubles champions receive a main-draw doubles wild card. The singles runner-up gets a place in qualifying, and the 16s champion receives a wild card into the US Open Junior Championships. No ranking is required and no professional record is needed. Win seven matches and you are in the draw at Flushing Meadows.
Jack Kennedy is the top seed in Kalamazoo. The 18-year-old from Huntington, New York, reached a career-high ITF junior world ranking of No. 5 and won the 2025 US Open boys’ doubles title alongside Keaton Hance, who is seeded fourth here. Kennedy is the incoming top recruit at the University of Virginia. He and Hance are also the top seeds in the doubles draw, which means a single week could hand them both a singles and a doubles place in New York.
The sixth seed is the more striking name. Jordan Lee, 16, of Orlando, won the Wimbledon boys’ singles title in July, beating Cruz Hewitt in the final. He already holds a wild card into US Open qualifying. Winning Kalamazoo would upgrade it to the main draw and make him one of the youngest men in the field. Sixteen-year-olds are no longer a novelty at this level: Kristina Liutova won a WTA 250 title in Memphis at the same age last week.
In San Diego the top seed is Julieta Pareja, who is already ranked inside the WTA top 300 and is playing an event restricted to American juniors. The seeding there has drawn criticism this week, with several players holding top-100 world junior rankings left unseeded or seeded in the thirties, though two withdrawals may account for part of it.
The pipeline argument is not theoretical. Iva Jovic won the girls’ 18s singles and doubles titles in San Diego in 2024. She is now No. 17 in the world, the youngest player in the WTA top 20, and reached the fourth round at Wimbledon this year. Coco Gauff played the same tournament before winning the US Open. Ben Shelton lost the Kalamazoo final in 2021 to Zach Svajda, and both men have since spent time inside the top 50. The depth of the American field at the majors this year traces back through events like these.
These are the least visible of the routes into the main draw. The US Open Wild Card Challenge awards one place to an American man and one to an American woman on ranking points accumulated across the summer hard-court swing, with the women’s race closing Sunday and the men’s a week later. A separate collegiate playoff at the USTA National Campus in Orlando produced two more in June. The junior championships supply two more again, and between them these three routes account for a meaningful share of the eight singles wild cards available in each draw.
The rest go to reciprocal agreements with other federations and to discretionary picks, which is how a former top-10 player at the end of his career or a returning name with no ranking ends up in the field. The junior route is the only one decided entirely on court in a single week, and the only one open to a player with no professional history at all.
There is a practical consequence for the draw itself. Two teenagers will occupy main-draw places that would otherwise have gone to players ranked inside the top 120, and both will almost certainly be unseeded first-round opponents for someone. Last year the winners were beaten in the first round. That is the usual outcome. It is also not really the point.
Both tournaments are free to attend and are being streamed. The US Open main draw begins Aug. 30, which gives the two champions two weeks between winning a national junior title and walking into a Grand Slam.
