Egypt's Mayar Sherif 'hungry for more' after winning third straight title

Going through the toughest period of her life and coming out the other side has totally transformed Mayar Sherif.

The 30-year-old Egyptian is the most successful tennis player from her country and peaked at No 31 in the world in the summer of 2023.

The Pepperdine University graduate spent nearly five years ranked in the top 100, and has featured in 19 Grand Slam main draws.

She is the first and only Egyptian to win a WTA title and has competed in two Olympic Games.

Renowned for her unrelenting fighting spirit, her unorthodox topspin forehand, and her ability to grind through three-plus hour matches on her beloved clay, Sherif started to detect chinks in her armour over the past 12 months.

She was losing matches she wasn’t accustomed to losing and her ranking slipped to as low as 129 – her lowest since February 2021 – a couple of months ago.

Today, the Cairene is back up to 55 in the world after winning three titles in a row – two at the WTA 125 level in Brescia and Contrexeville, and one at the WTA 250 level in Iasi, Romania.

She has won 15 of her last 16 matches – the only blemish came on grass in Wimbledon qualifying – and is riding a wave of confidence she has worked so hard to rebuild.

“One of the things that I'm good at is that I'm mentally very strong. When I come to close the match, I'm very strong. It's very tough to beat me,” Sherif told The National in an interview from Hamburg on Tuesday.

“If the match is 4-all or 5-all, I usually felt that mentally it’s very tough to beat me. But I was losing those moments so many times this year. I was very frustrated. I felt like I'm missing out on the things that make me special on the court.

“I don't have the best technique or the best looking tennis. But I'm a hard worker. I'm a fighter. I'm mentally very tough. That's why I got to where I am.

“I didn't accept that I was getting it wrong. The things that make me special, I was not special anymore. That was very frustrating. It shook my confidence in such a big way.”

Sherif described how bad it got for her on court during matches as she let anxiety take over.

“I went through a period this year I had never experienced before on the court,” she explained.

“I reached a point where my hand was shaking as I was serving from all the anxiety of not wanting to lose the same way again and again. Not wanting to get disappointed again and again. I really had such a hard time.

“So to get out of this and have again one of the best results of my career (winning a second tour-level title). I'm really, really proud of myself for it.”

Sherif said she worked hard with her psychologist, as well as her coach Justo Gonzalez, to get out of her “mental hole”.

In April, she lost a fourth consecutive match and decided to pull out of the Madrid Open because she couldn’t take it anymore. She took a week off and went to visit her sister, Rana, in Warsaw.

“Mentally I was at one of the lowest moments, not just in my career, but I would say in life in general,” Sherif admitted.

Despite being in desperate need for a break, Sherif dragged her sister to the practice courts every day just for the sake of hitting, with no real purpose behind it.

She was training because she wanted to and not because she had to.

When they weren’t on court, Sherif took the time to have some fun – a luxury for any tennis player who competes for nearly 11 months a year.

“My trip to Warsaw was very important. It was like a reset. I was very happy there. I was seeing a lot of Egyptian people. My sister has a lot of friends there. There is a great Egyptian community there, I was shocked actually. We went to see a funny Egyptian movie; I haven’t laughed this hard in my life. I did a lot of things that made me feel like a normal person,” said Sherif.

“I felt like a normal person. I felt happy. I felt that there is another life waiting for me afterwards. So, it's worth it to make the effort now to get a comfortable life later.

“And I realised how much I love tennis. Because when I stopped playing tennis, I really wanted to get back to it. I really wanted to get back to the competition and do well. I wanted to feel what I feel now. I wanted to feel the success. I wanted to feel that the hard work is paying off. I wanted to feel that after I failed so many times, I'm going to succeed afterwards. Because of course the satisfaction now is huge. It's really huge.”

The turning point for Sherif came during her second round of Roland Garros qualifying against Martina Trevisan. She felt something click within her as she battled past the Italian in three sets and she went on to qualify for the main draw in Paris, and reached the second round before falling to defending champion Coco Gauff.

“The first step was to accept that when I step on the court that this (feeling anxious) can happen and then I’ll try to do it better using techniques from my psychologist. So that I can get out of this hole. I started to gain confidence the first time I closed a match,” she reflected.

“The turning point was the match of Trevisan. The final set of the qualifying second round of the French Open. That's when I felt, I'm going to go after it. I didn't feel anxious to close the match anymore. I felt just like before. I took it and I closed it.

“This was the first step to get back on track. That's why I believed I was going to come back soon. Because I started to feel things I hadn’t felt on the court for a long time.”

Sherif had a 9-11 win-loss record for the season entering the French Open and has accumulated a 21-4 record since.

In a postponed final on Monday in Iasi, Sherif defeated former world No 2 Paula Badosa (who retired due to illness at 4-6, 0-4) to clinch the second WTA title of her career and first since 2022.

She then immediately flew to Hamburg, where she will contest her first round in the WTA 250 tournament on Wednesday.

Sherif has not stopped competing since the short break she took in Warsaw and has shot up the rankings from 127 to 55 in the world in the span of six weeks.

“I think I'm stronger than ever now, especially mentally. Because I touched the lowest of the lowest level mentally as a person. I learnt to have the confidence in the work, to have the confidence in the things that we do and to do the right things, and that the results will always come,” she said.

“If you fail and fail and fail, if you come out of that failure, if you succeed after that because you kept going, you will come back much stronger. And that's what I feel now.”

Sherif has already guaranteed her place in the US Open main draw next month and she hopes to re-enter the top 40 in order to book her spots at the WTA 1000 events in China later this season.

Armed with fresh perspective after going through a difficult period, Sherif has vowed to savour the experience on tour this time around.

“I'm still hungry to go for more. I'm still working hard and I'm very motivated because I've been through a lot and now I'm just enjoying it, enjoying the moment,” she said.

“I'm going to enjoy the tour much more than before because I realised that before, I didn't appreciate where I was for five years. I didn't go out of the top 100, out of the top 70, I was playing always the big tournaments and I didn't appreciate this.

“Now I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to go with a different mentality and I'm going to go after it – all in.”

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