Serena Williams will return to tennis next week at the HSBC Championships at Queen’s Club in London, and she will do it in doubles with Canadian teenager Victoria Mboko. The 44-year-old, who has not played an official match since the U.S. Open in 2022, is also now entered for the Berlin Tennis Open, widening a comeback that has moved from possibility to fixture in the space of a week.
For readers tracking queens tennis, the reason this matters now is simple: Williams is back on grass, back in competition and back on a schedule that keeps growing. She and Mboko, 19, practiced on Thursday at Queen’s Club, and on Friday the Berlin event announced she had been added there too, with play beginning June 15.
Williams’ return is especially striking because she stepped away at the U.S. Open in 2022 saying she was “evolving away” from tennis. She has since reentered the anti-doping program earlier this year, a requirement that made any official comeback possible and, by several accounts, may have delayed it. Former world No. 1 Lindsay Davenport said Williams might have returned sooner had she not had to spend six months in the program, and said she had heard at the U.S. Open last year that Williams wanted to play mixed doubles but could not under the drug-testing protocol.
Davenport said the sight of Williams back on court feels like a rare upbeat turn in a sport that often lives on departures rather than returns. She said she watched Williams walk off the court in New York and truly thought it was goodbye, but now sees a player with the shape and mindset to make an immediate impact. That sense of possibility is part of what makes this comeback so unusual: Williams has won Wimbledon seven times, holds 23 Grand Slam singles titles and has not reached a major final since the Australian Open in 2017, leaving her one behind Margaret Court and Novak Djokovic on the all-time list.
The unanswered piece is how far Williams wants to push this. She could ask for a singles wildcard at Wimbledon depending on how her first couple of events go, and next week’s Queen’s Club appearance will be the first real test of whether doubles is only the opening act. For now, the schedule itself is the story: London next week, Berlin on June 15, and a champion who once spoke like she was leaving the sport now adding events instead of subtracting them.
