Jasmine Paolini’s 2024 season was so surreal that I felt attuned to its scarcity even while it was still playing out. I was distracted by my real-time awareness that none of this could ever be replicated. How could it be? What is a tennis observer to make of a player, who had never advanced past the second round of a Slam, suddenly catapulting herself into the finals of Roland-Garros and Wimbledon? Here was a 5-foot-4 marvel, ricocheting all over the court like a Super Ball, playing with contagious joy. Got to enjoy this while it lasts.

Because there was only a single-season sample of her being one of the best players in the world, and there was a much larger sample of her being ranked far outside the top 50. Few players have ever turned their careers around like that at such an advanced age and had it stick. And as heartily as I throw my support behind all vertically challenged players on the pro tours, I understand the reality: Margins are slim. They have to rely on athleticism to compensate for a lack of easy power, and when that fails them, even by a half step, their game can fall off a cliff, à la Diego Schwartzman. So I had no idea how she would fare in 2025, the last season of her 20s.

The start was not auspicious. She entered the year at No. 4 in the world and, for the first two months of the season, did not beat any opponents ranked higher than No. 70. Paolini finally warmed up in Miami, making it to the semifinal, where she was promptly smashed by the eventual champ and season-long tyrant, Aryna Sabalenka. 

It wasn’t until mid-April that Paolini beat a fellow top 10 player. That was Coco Gauff, on the clay at Stuttgart. That was the first match of 2025 to validate Paolini’s lofty ranking, and even though it delivered her into another semifinal defeat at the hands of Aryna Sabalenka, beating Gauff would be a good prophecy for what was to come.

In the heat of the clay season, she went back home to Italy. Rome—like so many other stops on tour—was a tournament where she’d never seen much success. She hadn’t yet cleared the second round. This year, as the No. 5 player in the world, she was laboring under expectations for the first time. And the atmosphere was rare. Italy was relishing its recent rise to tennis supremacy, world No. 1 Jannik Sinner was making his debut after suspension, and the crowds sounded full of nearly religious fervor. They were rewarded for their faith when both Sinner and Paolini blazed to the finals, raising the possibility of an Italian sweep of both singles trophies. 

Though Sinner fell, Paolini finished the job. Faced with a challenging slate of opponents, she played spectacular tennis throughout the tournament—an addictively watchable blend of speed, power, variety, hands. Her opponent in the final, Coco Gauff, was swept away like all the rest. Paolini clinched the title in 89 minutes and danced around the court in one of the emotional apexes of the entire tennis season. She was the first Italian woman to win the Rome title in 40 years. The crowd regaled her with song. If that weren’t enough, the next day she picked up the doubles title with her friend and countrywoman Sara Errani. The new queen of Italian tennis probably could’ve retired from the sport that day and been content.

But the season went on; it always does. Roland-Garros and Wimbledon, sites of past glory, brought only disappointment in 2025: a squandered triple match point in the fourth round, and a second-round exit, respectively. But Paolini bounced back with another run to a 1000 final, this time in Cincinnati, along the way beating Coco Gauff for the third straight time. Her opponent in the final was a white-hot, post-Wimbledon Iga Swiatek, who dealt Paolini the sixth loss of their six meetings. But after a middling US Open, and after leading Italy to a second straight Billie Jean King Cup, Paolini got another look at Swiatek in Wuhan. This time it was one of the shock results of the entire season: 6–1, 6–2, a flawless Paolini victory, and her last big splash in 2025.

On court, Paolini found consistency. In the player’s box, there was some instability. She moved on from her coach Renzo Furlan, whom she had been working with for a decade. She then tried Marc Lopez, but that lasted for only three months, and then started working on a provisional basis with rookie coach Federico Gaio. I would expect to see more changes there in the coming weeks. But the tennis part seems to have been all sorted out. For all the uncertainty heading into the season, 2025 was a remarkably normal year. There were no Slam finals this time. The spikiness smoothed out, and she eased into life as a top 10 player, stacking solid wins week after week, claiming some nice trophies, ending as world No. 8. It was, after all, a sneakily wonderful season, one that seemed designed to assure everyone that 2024 was no mirage.