Iva Jovic used her off-season to get stronger, faster, and quicker. So far it's paying off in 2026

Iva Jovic knows that playing a home favorite in Rod Laver Arena isn’t an enviable assignment. But she had backup—noisy backup—for her match with Australia’s Priscilla Hon on Wednesday night.

“About 15 of my cousins are here in Melbourne,” said Jovic, a California native whose father is Serbian and mother is Croatian. “They have shirts with my name on them, so it’s quite an elaborate thing.”

“And they’re quite loud, so it will be the Jovic’s against a lot of Aussies.”

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As it turned out, Jovic wouldn’t need a ton of help against the 121st-ranked Hon. She quieted the crowd by jumping out to a 3-0 lead, and only briefly allowed them any hope when she went down 0-2 in the second set. After that, though, she promptly won six straight games, and by the time she closed out the match, 6-1, 6-2, in 71 minutes, the buzz had gone out of the building completely. The Jovic family may have outnumbered the Hon fans still left in the stands.

“I feel like I played good, solid tennis, just tried to be there every single point,” Jovic said. “Not give her any breathing room, thankfully it was enough today.”

“It’s just surreal to be on this court,” Jovic added of her Laver debut. “This is definitely what I dreamed of as a kid. I still feel like a kid.”

That may be because Jovic is about as close to a kid as you can get in adult-level tennis. She turned 18 a little more than a month ago. She’s so young, in fact, that she didn’t decide to pursue tennis seriously until Covid hit in 2020.

I took a pretty long pre-season, so I had a lot of time to get everything done.

With team sports closed off, Jovic focused on the one she could play safely. And play well: By the time she was 14, in 2021, she had won the Orange Bowl. She considered joining her older sister, Mia, at UCLA, but ventured onto the tour instead—if you’re as precociously talented as she is, you don’t have much choice. By the end of 2025, she had her first title, in Guadalajara, and was into the Top 50.

Still, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Jovic, who is a slender 5-foot-7 or so (the WTA lists her height as “N/A”), will always have to fight an uphill battle in the physicality department, and she paid her dues on the ITF circuit in her rookie year.

“It’s just such a different mentality,” she told CincinnatiOpen.com last summer of her transition to the pros. “In the juniors, people kind of give away points a little bit more…Here’s you can tell that everyone’s fighting for every single point.”

“If you let up a little bit, it can be all over. That’s what I’m getting used to.”

Is it safe to say she’s used to it now? Jovic clearly made the most of her off-season, and has come out of the gates fast in 2026. With her second-round win over Hon, she’s 8-2 on the season. Last week she was runner-up un Hobart; so far in Melbourne, she has dropped just eight games in two rounds. In the past year, her ranking has risen from 195 to 27.

“I took a pretty long pre-season, so I had a lot of time to get everything done,” Jovic says. “There was a couple of specific things I was working on. There was a lot of physical stuff in the gym, getting stronger, getting faster, getting quicker. A couple of technical tweaks with my ground strokes, with my serve, which took time as well.”

Jovic’s “Christmas list” of wishes for this season included using more variety and making her second serve less predictable. But she also has looked stronger all around this year, from her first serve to her running forehand.

Last summer in Cincy, Jovic lost in three sets to Barbora Krejcikova. Afterward, I described how the Czech turned the match around.

“Krejcikova cut out the mistakes, and found the range on her heavy crosscourt forehand. It was a shot that Jovic had no answer for all day…When she had a look at a forehand, Jovic could rocket it, but her second serve was attackable, and deep balls from Krejickova troubled her.”

On Wednesday, Hon also tried a couple of heavy crosscourt forehands to Jovic. This time, she had an answer: Twice she took the ball on the rise and fired her own forehand down the line for a winner. It felt like a step up from last year for Jovic, and a necessary one if she’s going to keep progressing in the rankings.

In fact, Jovic was so strong in her first-round win that an Aussie commentator, after seeing her bludgeon a forehand winner, exclaimed, “It’s just brute force from Jovic!” Those may not be the first words that normally come to mind when you see this mild-mannered teenager play, or hear her talk, but the more brute force she can add to her game, the better.

Does Jovic’s early-season success ring a bell? Two years ago, another young, somewhat undersized U.S. player, Emma Navarro, started by making the semis in Auckland, winning the title in Hobart, and reaching the third round in Melbourne. From there, she jumped to No. 8 in the world by the end of the season.

Since then, Navarro’s star has faded a bit; this year she went out in the first round at the AO. These days, though, there’s always a new face in U.S. tennis, and a new talent to watch rise. Next for Jovic will be No. 7 seed Jasmine Paolini. The 5-foot-4 Italian should be an inspiration to the American, but so far she has also been a nemesis: They’ve played twice, and Paolini has won both times.

“Hopefully the third time’s the charm for me,” Jovic says. “I’ve made a lot of improvements since the last time I played her.”