Serena Williams will return to competition next week in the women’s doubles field at Queen’s Club in London, beginning a comeback that tennis has been waiting to see for nearly three years. The 44-year-old has not played singles since the 2022 U.S. Open, when she bowed out in a match that felt, at the time, like the end.
That makes the timing matter. Queen’s Club is one of the tuneups for Wimbledon, and Williams is stepping back into the sport at a stage that still sits under the sport’s brightest summer spotlight. For a player whose presence has long bent attention toward her and the draw she is in, even a doubles return is enough to shift the conversation.
Williams last played singles at the 2022 U.S. Open, where she lost to Ajla Tomljanović, 7-5, 6-7, 6-1, in the third round after saving five match points in a gritty match that stretched past the three-hour mark. Between her second and third singles matches there, she also played a doubles match with her sister Venus, a reminder of how often the Williams name has traveled together through the sport’s biggest stages. Now the return is starting again in doubles, and it is starting in London.
There is a reason the comeback has been so slow. Williams reentered the anti-doping testing pool last fall, and six months later she became eligible to play again. That path explains why her next appearance is coming in doubles first rather than as a full-scale singles return, but it also leaves open the possibility that the comeback will not stay limited to doubles for long.
The broader significance goes beyond one match or one tournament. Williams changed how women, especially Black women, are seen and understood in sports, and her returns have always carried that weight with them. In women’s tennis in 2026, stars such as Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka are part of the picture, but Williams remains one of the names that still changes the temperature of the conversation the moment she reappears.
She has said in the past that she does not give up, and that line still fits the way this comeback is unfolding. Queen’s Club will be the first public answer, not the last one. The bigger question is no longer whether Williams is coming back at all, but how long it takes before doubles becomes only the opening chapter.
