{"id":80148,"date":"2025-02-21T09:56:41","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T14:56:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=80148"},"modified":"2025-02-21T09:56:41","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T14:56:41","slug":"four-players-receive-merida-open-wild-cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2025\/02\/21\/four-players-receive-merida-open-wild-cards\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Players Receive Merida Open Wild Cards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Merida Open is one of two WTA hard-court tournaments that will be played in the lead-up to Indian Wells. This year, the event will be part of the WTA 500 series, offering lower-ranked players the opportunity to gobble up valuable ranking points.<\/p>\n<p>But the field is quite strong with <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2024\/11\/14\/emma-navarro-2024-american-sensation\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">Emma Navarro<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2025\/01\/21\/paula-badosa-australian-open\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">Paula Badosa<\/a> among the Top 10 representatives. Croatia&#8217;s Donna Vekic impressed on her last trip to Mexico&#8211;Vekic won the 2022 Monterrey Open.<\/p>\n<p>All the seeded players are ranked in the world&#8217;s Top 40 and include Marta Kostyuk, Beatriz Haddad Maia, Maria Sakkari, and Magda Linette.<\/p>\n<p>The tournament has officially announced the list of wild card recipients for the 2025 Merida Open, and it features four names.<\/p>\n<h2>Four Players Receive Merida Open Wild Cards<\/h2>\n<p>The first wild card in this year&#8217;s tournament is <strong>Sloane Stephens<\/strong>. The former <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/category\/us-open\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">US Open<\/a> champion has lifted two of her eight career titles on Mexican soil (Acapulco and Guadalajara). She was a quarterfinalist in the first edition of the Merida Open. Stephens is yet to win a match in 2025 and last played at the Australian Open where she lost in the first round to Aryna Sabalenka.<\/p>\n<p>The second wild card has gone to home player <strong>Renata Zarazua<\/strong>. As the only Mexican in the Top 100, Zarazua will be determined to go deeper in this year&#8217;s draw. She reached the last eight on debut last year.<\/p>\n<p>The third name on the list is unsurprisingly the defending champion <strong>Zeynep Sonmez<\/strong>. The 22-year-old Turk won her maiden WTA title in Merida against the odds. It was a result that helped Sonmez achieve a Top-100 year-end ranking and has since maintained her spot in that group.<\/p>\n<p><a  id=\"zXW-cTznQC1_veanNGwbpw\" class=\"gie-single\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/2182678580\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color:#a7a7a7;text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal !important;border:none;display:inline-block;\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><script>window.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'zXW-cTznQC1_veanNGwbpw',sig:'YYzdtaIRSQ_67p5iarTYryBp8owN3qrTVRx7qLYoyGM=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'2182678580',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});<\/script><script src='\/\/embed-cdn.gettyimages.com\/widgets.js' charset='utf-8' async><\/script><\/p>\n<p>The last wild card entrant is World No. 19 <strong>Anna Kalinskaya<\/strong>. The Russian is looking to snap a three-match losing streak and is projected to lose a huge chunk of points for exiting the Dubai Championships in the first round (she was defending runner-up points from last year).<\/p>\n<p><em>Main Photo Credit: Danielle Parhizkaran-USA TODAY Sports<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Merida Open is one of two WTA hard-court tournaments that will be played in the lead-up to Indian Wells. This year, the event will be part of the WTA 500 series, offering lower-ranked players the opportunity to gobble up valuable ranking points. But the field is quite strong with Emma Navarro and Paula Badosa [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2341,"featured_media":62667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,2,4],"tags":[7645,11223,42828,12171,11115,463,18884],"class_list":["post-80148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-featured","category-wta","tag-anna-kalinskaya","tag-emma-navarro","tag-merida-open","tag-paula-badosa","tag-renata-zarazua","tag-sloane-stephens","tag-zeynep-sonmez"],"modified_by":"Yesh Ginsburg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80148"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80153,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80148\/revisions\/80153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}