WHAT HAPPENED  In 2001, Daja Bedanova looked like a top prospect, notching wins over Monica Seles, Amelie Mauresmo and Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario and reaching her first Slam quarterfinal at the U. S. Open.
The next year also looked promising – she beat Amanda Coetzer, Jelena Dokic and Anastasia Myskina and hit the Top Twenty. Then her shoulder started acting up, and the end came quickly. After the 2002 U.S. Open, she never defeated on top 30 player, and won only six Tour matches in 2003. By 2004, she was playing Challengers, and losing mostly to players ranked below No. 200.
She gave up and retired in mid-2005, just months after she turned 22.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  Elena Bovina was one of the younger members of the great Russian wave that also included Anastasia Myskina, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Elena Dementieva, Nadia Petrova and Vera Zvonareva. Going into the French Open in 2005, she had won a title at New Haven and scored ten wins over Top Twenty players. After the French Open, she didn’t play another match until Moscow 2006 because of a string on injuries, particularly the shoulder.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  The original prodigy of the modern era has come back from oblivion before, going from teenage burnout to three-time Grand Slam champ and world No. 1. But after the grand victories of 2002 and 2003, her shoulder was a wreck by the end of 2004.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  Dokic looked like she was son destined to be a fixture in the top 5 after pulling off a historic upset of defending champ Martina Hingis in the first round of Wimbledon in 1999 and winning Rome two years later. But the warning signs had already started to appear, with Dokic changing her nationality from Australian to Yugoslav under the influence of her notorious father Damir. She eventually broke away from him and her career appeared to be on the right track for the next couple of years, but another dubious relationship soon emerged as a pair of brothers took over as coach and boyfriend, respectively. Bothered by an elbow injury, she lost her last nine matches in 2004 and was playing qualifying by the middle of 2005. The following year, she reverted back to Australian citizenship and re-established ties with Tennis Australia, but played just one match in 2007.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  Groenefeld had two big highlights in 2006, winning her first title at Acapulco and making the French Open quarterfinal. But even a relatively minor shoulder injury was enough to throw her serve – and her game – completely out of whack. A combination of injuries and a vicious feud with her former coach saw her win just nine matches in 26 events between August 2006 and August 2007.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  What can you say about Hingis? The skilful Swiss has the distinction of having retired twice against her will, the first time with foot injuries (and disillusionment about her place in the power game) and the second time after testing positive for cocaine (which came after back and hip injuries had already begun affecting her play once again). She vowed her innocence as she left, but the publicity surrounding her exit means few will ever struggle to remember, “Whatever happened to Martina Hingis?”
 

WHAT HAPPENED  Sesil Karatancheva certainly made a big impact on the game during a very short period with her bold statements and precocious results. She made her WTA debut in 2004 and complied 24 WTA match wins in less than two years – including a French Open quarterfinal in 2005. She needed only seven WTA events to reach the Top Hundred, and a dozen to reach the Top Fifty.

Then, at the end of 2005, she flunked a drug test. She blamed it on a pregnancy, but could not make the explanation stick at her original hearing nor the subsequent appeal. She was suspended from the game before she was even old enough to finish high school.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  It almost seemed as if Kournikova’s career was destined to be a shooting star: A bright upward streak (she reached a semifinal at her first Wimbledon) and quick fizzle out (her last match as a pro came before she turned 22).
The game’s biggest crossover star was blamed for both having too many offcourt interests and working too hard. With a bad back and a screw in her foot, she won only one WTA match after Moscow 2002 and is now unofficially retired.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  The Russian with the ever-changing hair color beat then-No. 1 Kim Clijsters at Toronto in 2003 after getting a win over Monica Seles earlier that year. But then began a run of problems – shoulder in at the end of 2003, liver in 2004, stomach in 2005. She went 7-13 in 2004, with only four match wins after the Australian Open and a first-round loss at Montreal, where she was defending the previous year’s final. She played two events in 2005, including a loss in Australian Open qualifying. A comeback was scheduled for mid-2005, but more happily this time, a pregnancy scuttled those plans. She gave birth to a son in November 2005 and has not been back since. Krasnoroutskaya was 20 years old when she played her last match.

WHAT HAPPENED  Lucic as a teenager set some astonishing records: She won both the first WTA singles tournament she contested (Bol 1997) and the first doubles tournament she contested (Australian Open 1998, with Martina Hingis). In fact, she won the first two doubles events she entered; she and Hingis would also win the 1998 Pan Pacific. Later that year, Lucic defended her title at Bol, making her the youngest player ever to defend a title, and reached the semifinals of Wimbledon.
But Lucic was one of those players with a violent, demanding father. She eventually fled to the United States to get away from him, but in the aftermath, she seemed to lose her drive – and for a while began working with another disgraced coach. At the time she came up, she was considered the hardest hitter ever in the sport, but her mental and physical fitness suffered and she fell out of the Top Hundred in 2000. After one brief splash at the 2001 French Open (reaching the third round as a qualifier), she didn't win another WTA match until Roland Garros 2002. She didn’t win a match in 2003, played the Dothan Challenger in 2004 and 2005, and didn’t play at all in 2006 – financial constraints were a large factor.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  It seems strange to say that a player's career was ruined by a toe injury, but that's what Myskina suffered. Of course, her career had already nearly been wrecked by a botched wrist operation, and her shoulders have given her trouble, too. The 2004 French Open winner managed to be a significant force until mid-2006 (she beat Kuznetsova at Eastbourne that year, then Jankovic at Wimbledon), but lost her opening match at six of her remaining seven events.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  Pierce's career has been a long cycle of bad injuries followed by dramatic comebacks. Another player addled with a mad dad, she managed to break free and ride her bullet groundstrokes to two Grand Slams, including the French Open in her adopted homeland in 2003. But even given her dramatic history, watching her collapse to the court at Linz 2006 was painful just to watch.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  Rubin, too, is a player whose body has frequently betrayed her. Often she would get hurt, then come back stronger. But not this last time. She did not play between Cincinnati 2005 and Stanford 2006 (almost exactly a year), played seven events in 2006 while winning only one match. There's been no publicized word on retirement, but she has not played since Quebec City 2006.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  Going from teenage No. 1 to victim of an on-court stabbing, Seles managed to return well enough to capture a ninth Grand Slam, but could not quite recapture her previous form because of struggles with injuries and fitness. Her last event was the French Open in 2003, and even before that she had been injured most of the year, earning only 10 wins.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  Sprem is another of those players who seemed to go into a slump almost from the moment she really arrived. Her big moment was surely the Wimbledon 2004 quarterfinal (that was the Slam where she beat Venus Williams in a mis-scored tiebreak). But she lost her opening match in three of her last four events that year, and went on to go 15-23 in 2005; by the end of the year, she was playing qualifying. Obviously her decline wasn't the result of catastrophic injury -- she played two dozen events in 2005.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  Stevenson seems to have big server disease: Back and shoulder problems. She sprung onto the scene in 1999, grabbing headlines as a qualifier turned Wimbledon semifinalist with singing and acting ambitions, not to mention the revelation that her father was a former NBA star. She maintained good results for the rest of the year and played a full schedule until 2003, but won only 13 matches that season and fell out of the top 50. 2004 saw her fall out of the top 100; she won only two Tour matches, and did not play a WTA event after the U. S. Open. In 2005, she played only a handful of events, didn't earn a WTA win, and fell below No. 1000.
 

WHAT HAPPENED  The hard-hitting kid from Uzbekistan served notice of her presence in 2001, when she won back-to-back tournaments in the fall, beating Elena Dementieva, Paola Suarez, and Patty Schnyder at the former and Kim Clijsters at the latter. She had also beaten Mary Pierce the month before. Later that year, she would add Justine Henin to her collection of scalps.
She has not won another title or beaten another top 10 player since. In 2003, her elbow began giving her serious trouble, ending her season halfway through. She came back more than a year later, at Tashkent, but won only one match, and then ended up in challengers. Family conflict has reportedly also been an issue.