The week everything came together for Vicky Duval was the week it all fell apart.

The bubbly American ingenue arrived at Wimbledon last June an 18-year-old star in ascent who’d spent the previous two years soaring nearly 500 places up the women’s rankings and amassing more than $230,000 in prize money. She won three qualifying matches to make the main draw and upended a seeded player in the first round to break into the top 100 for the first time.

And she was told she had cancer.

On Wednesday, far from the impeccably manicured lawns of the All England Club where more than a year ago she put her dreams on hold, Duval, now 19, resumed her career on Court 6 at the Hempfield Rec Center in the first round of a $25,000 ITF tournament on the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Here, an hour and a half west of Philadelphia in the equivalent of tennis’s minor leagues, Duval won 6-4, 6-3 over a fresh-faced college player named Sophie Chang, dispensing of the world No832 as convincingly as she beaten the Hodgkin’s lymphoma that until the fall had threatened to cut down a life in bloom.

Satellite tournaments like the Koser Jewelers Tennis Challenge are populated by names familiar to hardcore fans. Held year-round in smaller towns and communities across six continents, these pop-up events are the domain of the almost famous, where an aspiring junior, emerging pro or journeyman on the brink can stockpile the ranking points necessary to compete on the major tours and earn a living as a professional tennis player. On the stadium court Wednesday was Shelby Rogers, the 22-year-old from South Carolina who peaked at No70 after reaching the Bad Gastein final last year but who is recovering from an MCL tear. There was Grace Min, the US Open girls’ champion of four years ago who’s spent the 2015 season floating in and out of the top 100. On Court 7 was Alexandra Stevenson, who famously made the semi-finals of Wimbledon in 1999 as a qualifier and topped out at No18 in the world, but now finds herself fighting for her spot against up-and-comers half her age.



And there was Duval, the indefatigable teenager who had shared Arthur Ashe Stadium with Kim Clijsters at the 2012 US Open and briefly cracked the mainstream when she stunned 2011 champion Sam Stosur on the same court one year later, winning over the New York City crowd with her fearless game, distinctively high-pitched voice – think Hooks from Police Academy – and magnetic personality.



Duval’s national breakthrough came at the 2012 US Open when she shocked defending champion Sam Stosur in the first round.

Duval was last to play Wednesday on the tournament’s third show court and emerged from the door of a chain link fence shortly after 6pm, signature sunglasses nestled above a navy blue visor. Moments earlier the American veteran Vania King had required no less than 14 match points to see off Julie Coin, further extending an already backlogged order of play that left Duval going through her pre-match routine of lying down and listening to classical music – Vivaldi before Wednesday’s match, a break from her regular Mozart or Bach – for a second and third time.



When she finally took the court for her first competitive match in nearly 14 months before two dozen spectators and the persisting din of cicadas, Duval commanded her service games from the jump. She hung in the rallies and crunched winners off both wings with pace and accuracy, breaking the 832nd-ranked Chang in the third game and coasting to the first set, dropping only three points on her serve. The quality of her flat, angled groundstrokes belied a player absent from competition for more than year – a layoff that had cost Duval her singles ranking but clearly not her taste for the fight.

The second set was initially more of the same. Duval uncorked a cross-court forehand winner on break point in the third game to move within touching distance of the finish line. Even when Chang conjured her best and deposited perfectly struck winners into the corners, the fleet Duval was there to effortlessly scoop them back into play. After she punctuated a forehand return winner to move ahead a second break with a fist pump, the result seemed all but a handshake away.

Then Duval, who had lost only six points on her serve all match, responded with a loose service game – including a double fault on break point – to gift Chang an opening. Yet as quickly as the crevasse of doubt had appeared, Duval slammed it shut with a series of emphatic winners to immediately break back. Within minutes, but not before a thudding ace to set up match point that left Chang shaking her head, it was over.

“It felt ridiculously good,” said Duval, who earned $832 in prize money for the win. “For months I had visions about my first match back and it was pretty much exactly what I expected: a little shaky at the start and then I got comfortable and then it started going well.”

Duval is no stranger to crisis. Born in Miami to Haitian parents, she was held at gunpoint by robbers along with two cousins in Port-Au-Prince at age 7. Amid the 2010 earthquake that wreaked a catastrophic toll on Haiti, Duval’s father Jean-Maurice was buried alive for 11 hours and emerged with paralysis in his left arm, forcing him to close his practice as a gynecologist and obstetrician.

And then last year at a tournament in Mexico, Duval noticed a lump in her neck and immediately told her mother. Upon arriving in Europe ahead of Wimbledon they ordered an emergency biopsy. After she’d won the first of three qualifying matches at the All England Club, the doctor informed her of the results – and the nature of the fight ahead.

What followed were five cycles of chemotherapy – months of headaches, stomach pains, the metallic taste that lingers after treatment – that tested her resolve and faith. “My body went through a lot,” she says. “I think the most stressful part was, ‘Is my body gonna be OK?’”

In September, Duval announced she had completed her treatment and was cancer-free, but that was only the beginning. Her muscles had atrophied and her match fitness had deteriorated to alarming levels. She practiced an hour a day, often through pain and nausea. Throughout her recovery Duval grew close with Venus Williams, who sent her constant messages of support. “She didn’t really give me advice,” Duval recalls. “She would just ask how I was doing and tell me to keep my head up. Hang in there and you’ll get out of it alive.”

Having taken her first step back, Duval plans to enter the qualifying draws at Cincinnati and New Haven in the next two weeks. There she hopes to deliver results noteworthy enough to earn a wild-card entry into this month’s US Open, the season-ending grand slam where she enjoyed her national coming-out party.

Duval, who enjoys oil painting and knitting in her free time, says her career goals now are no different than before. “I want be top 10 in the world and that’s still something I’m confident I’ll achieve,” she said Wednesday. “It’s gonna be a longer process because of what I’ve been through but achievable.”

After everything she’s overcome, only a fool would doubt her.

“My biggest motto is to understand that everything happens for a reason,” she says. “A lot of times people doubt life and people say things are unfair, but I feel like if happens to you it’s because it’s supposed to happen to you. Things don’t just happen. Whatever it is, understand that you have to just hang in there and you’ll get out of it one way or another.”