Serena Williams is returning to professional tennis. The 23-time Grand Slam champion, 44, has been confirmed as a wildcard entrant for the Doubles event at the HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club, which begins June 8. The Queen’s Club Championships posted on X simply: “THE QUEEN RETURNS.” Williams acknowledged the news on her own social media with a Nike collaboration video, captioning it: “Good news travels fast.” Whether this leads to Wimbledon or the US Open later this summer remains unclear.
Is Serena Williams making a comeback to Tennis?
The short answer is yes, though Serena Williams herself spent much of the past year pushing back against that framing. After the International Tennis Integrity Agency confirmed in December 2025 that she had re-entered the sport’s anti-doping testing pool, a mandatory step for any returning professional, she took to X to shut down the speculation: “Omg yall I’m NOT coming back. This wildfire is crazy.”A month later, she appeared on NBC’s TODAY with anchor Savannah Guthrie and remained similarly vague about her intentions.Then came Sunday’s announcement.Williams first stepped back from the sport in 2022, famously laying out her thinking in Vogue’s September issue. “I have never liked the word retirement,” she wrote. “It doesn’t feel like a modern word to me.” She described what she was doing as an “evolution,” moving toward family, business, and everything outside the white lines. At the time, she and her husband Alexis Ohanian had one daughter, Olympia. Their second daughter, Adira River Ohanian, arrived in August 2023.Queen’s Club has historically served as a warm-up tournament for Wimbledon. Whether Williams uses it as a genuine springboard or simply a test of where her body and game stand, Sunday’s wildcard entry makes one thing clear: the evolution may not be finished yet.
Who is Alexis Ohanian, Serena Williams’ husband?
Their meet-cute belongs in a film. In May 2015, both Williams and Ohanian were staying at the Rome Cavalieri. Williams was there for the Italian Open. Ohanian, the tech entrepreneur and Reddit co-founder, had come for a media conference. He sat down at a poolside table that happened to be part of Williams’ reserved section. She tried, initially, to have him moved. He stayed. They ended up talking for hours.Their first date was in Paris.ID@undefined Caption not available.ID@undefined Caption not available.Ohanian, now 42, was born in Brooklyn to a German mother and a father whose family fled during the Armenian genocide. He grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., graduated from Howard High School in 2001, and later studied history and commerce at the University of Virginia, where he met Steve Huffman on day one of freshman year. The two built Reddit in roughly three weeks. Sixteen months later, they sold it to Condé Nast for a reported $10 to $20 million.Since then, Ohanian has remained a fixture in both the tech and venture capital worlds. He has also, consistently, been one of Williams’ loudest supporters. When she announced her transition away from the sport in 2022, he wrote: “I’ve seen over the last 7 years how much y’all love my wife, what she means to so many, worldwide. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”He has also been public about why parental leave matters to him personally. After Olympia’s birth in September 2017, he took 16 weeks off and later began lobbying Congress for federal paid family leave legislation. In a 2020 New York Times op-ed, he disclosed that Williams nearly died during childbirth, a fact that deepened his commitment to both fatherhood and advocacy.The couple married in New Orleans in November 2017. Their second daughter, Adira, was announced at the 2023 Met Gala in the most on-brand way possible: Williams told the Vogue livestream, standing on the red carpet, “There’s three of us here.”
