With clay titles, Jenson Brooksby and Jessica Pegula made 2025 all the more promising

This is a good week—sometimes it’s the only week—for U.S. players to put a clay-court title on their résumés. Charleston and Houston are the only places where professional dirt-ball comes to the States. When these tournaments are over, the long slog through European dirt begins. For U.S. players, that’s a place where once-promising seasons tend to get stuck in the mud.

In 2024, Ben Shelton and Danielle Collins made the most of this week by winning in Houston and Charleston, respectively. Now two more Americans, Jessica Pegula and Jenson Brooksby, have done the same. It’s a first clay-court victory for both, and even if neither wins another this spring, these felt like important mileposts, in different ways, for each player.

Pegula’s championship in Charleston, which concluded with a 6-3, 7-5 win over Sofia Kenin on Sunday, was a show of staying power. The last five weeks have been some of the busiest and best of her career. She started March with her first title of 2025, in Austin. She ended the month by reaching her first final at the Miami Open. With no break after that two-week effort, a title run on a new surface in Charleston seemed like a long shot. But she survived five more matches, including two three setters, and finished with a final burst of energy. Down 1-5 in the second set to Kenin, she won the last five games.

“I told myself I was really tired, and it almost kind of helped me relax,” Pegula said to Tennis Channel. “I think I did start to play a little bit better, served a little bit better, and was able to close it out.”

Conditions were gusty, and you could see it in the streakiness of each player. Runs of winners were followed right away by runs of errors, as momentum passed back and forth every couple of games. In the end, it was Kenin who lost her range when she was ahead in the second set, and never got it back.

“I knew I had the momentum back, and I wanted to hold onto it as long as I could,” Pegula said of her stretch run.

By now, after 17 wins in 19 matches and a tour-leading 25 victories this season, Pegula has the calm that comes with sustained success. In the quarters, she shrugged off a 6-1 first set loss to Collins. In the semis, she squeaked past Ekaterina Alexandrova 7-5 in the third. On Monday, she’ll pass Coco Gauff to become the top-ranked U.S. woman again, and return to a career-high No. 3 in the world.

We’ve seen Pegula make a similarly strong run as recently as last summer, when she won Canada, and made the finals in Cincinnati and New York. That was on her favorite surface, hard courts; this time, she’ll try to keep her hot streak alive on clay. Like I said above, this is where promising American seasons go to die. But Pegula has made the final in Madrid and the quarters in Paris and Rome in the past.

I knew I had the momentum back, and I wanted to hold onto it as long as I could. Jessica Pegula

The longer-term question to me concerns her ranking, and her mindset about it. The last time she was No. 3, in 2022, I didn’t get the sense she thought she could crack the Swiatek-Sabalenka duopoly at No. 1 and 2. Can she bring herself to believe that she can conquer them this time? Pegula 6-13 against the Top 2, but she did beat Swiatek in the US Open semis last year. By now, after four years in the Top 10 and a Grand Slam final appearance, Pegula shouldn’t have any doubts that she belongs in that rarefied air, and that she can compete for any title, against opponent, on any surface, on any continent. The next six months will be interesting ones for her.

While Pegula’s win in Charleston was a test of endurance, she didn’t have to survive as many death-defying moments as Brooksby did in Houston. If you had told him, last Saturday, as he was facing a match point against Federico Augustin Gomez in his first qualifying match, that he was going to win the tournament eight days later, he probably would have…well, I don’t know what he would have done, but I doubt he would have believed you.

Brooksby would go on to save match points two more times, against the third-seed, Alejandro Tabilo, and the top seed, Tommy Paul. In between, he had a relative cakewalk over Aleksandar Kovacevic; it only went to 6-4 in the third. In all of those matches, Brooksby showed off his trademark tenacity; his changes of speed; his unorthodox two-handed backhand drop shot and volley; and his ability to suddenly up the m.p.h.s and rifle a forehand into a tight window down the line.

By the time he got to Sunday, and a final against Frances Tiafoe, the 24-year-old was fully dialed in. He shot out of the gate with a flurry of winners, and won the first four games. While Tiafoe made it a match late in the first and early in the second, Brooksby finished as strong as he started. A curling backhand pass, hit on the full run, gave him a break for 4-2, and he didn’t look back from there.

“All the way from qualifying, match point down,” Brooksby said to his team during the trophy ceremony. “That’s pretty intense, so thanks for sticking with it, every match, every day here for me.”

Brooksby, who reached a high of No. 33 in 2022, has endured a suspension and shoulder surgery, and has returned this season with a new team. He showed positive signs in Indian Wells, but this week he put it all together with seven wins, two of of them over Top 20 countrymen, Tiafoe and Paul. We say it just about every week these days, but you can add another American to the list of players to watch in the months and years ahead.

That goes double for Brooksby, who is especially, and oddly, watchable. His game is funky, his serve isn’t spectacularly fast, and elegance is not a word you hear, or think, when he plays. Despite that, he’s an exciting, stubborn competitor who gives full effort, and somehow makes nearly as many jaw-dropping shots per match as the game’s much more elegant superstars. Brooksby’s season just got much more promising; let’s see how far he can take it.