Andrea Petkovic

Andrea Petkovic (Андреа Петковић, ; born 9 September 1987) is a German former professional tennis player.

Petkovic obtained German citizenship in 2001.

She speaks Serbian, German, English, and French.

Petkovic is of Bosniak and Serb ancestry.

She was the winner of the tournaments in Antalya, Podgorica (both in 2004), Davos and Alphen aan den Rijn (both in 2005).

Born in Tuzla, SFR Yugoslavia, to Serbian father Zoran and Bosniak mother Amira, she moved to Germany at six months old and turned professional in 2006 at the age of 18.

Petkovic graduated from high school in 2006 with an Abitur from the Georg-Büchner-Schule in Darmstadt.

Petkovic turned professional in 2006 after she finished school, but she had already won four titles on the ITF Circuit.

Petkovic became the German national champion in 2007 and 2009.

Andrea Petkovic was born in Tuzla, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SFR Yugoslavia.

When she was six months old, the family relocated to Germany.

Petkovic first took to the tennis courts when she was six; her father Zoran Petković, former Yugoslav tennis player and member of the Yugoslavia Davis Cup team, was a coach at a club in Darmstadt at the time.

He introduced her to the sport and later became her coach.

She was able to finish high school before competing in tennis full-time because Zoran never pressured her into joining the professional circuit.

Apart from tennis, she likes to educate herself by reading; her favourite authors are Goethe and Wilde.

Her mother Amira is a dental assistant while her younger sister Anja is a student.

In April 2007, she became a member of the German Fed Cup team.

She played her first Grand Slam tournament at the 2007 French Open where she reached the second round, after coming through the qualifying without losing a set and beating Jarmila Groth.

There she lost to later Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli.

After this, and having some success on the ITF Circuit (she won the ITF title in Contrexéville in July 2007), she reached the top 100 of the WTA rankings for the first time.

Because of that, she was able to play in the US Open main draw without having to qualify.

She once again reached the second round after beating Audra Cohen.

In round two she lost to Lucie Šafářová.

She has been studying political science at the FernUniversität Hagen since 2008.

Petkovic also has a successful YouTube channel which is home to her video blog entitled "Petkorazzi".

In the blog, she makes fun of herself, gives fans chances to win prizes, and shows fans what life is like on the tour.

She does the blog in both German and English.

At the Australian Open in January 2008, in her first-round match against Anna Chakvetadze, she suffered a cruciate ligament rupture in her right knee after only two minutes of play.

This prevented her from playing any tournament for almost eight months, which caused her ranking drop to 465.

After the injury, she started playing mostly on the ITF Circuit again where she won a tournament in Istanbul in November 2008.

She finished the year with a ranking of 315.

In a 2009 interview with the WTA, she stated that her parents might move to Novi Sad, Serbia, where they have a second home.

When asked how German she feels, Petkovic replied, "Obviously I'm German, but I always say my soul is still Serbian. Germans are generally more cool, reserved. I'm very emotional, have lots of fire in my personality. In that sense still feel very close to my heritage. For all that, there is much to appreciate about Germany. I feel like I am part of the 'system' and feel very rooted there."

A former top-10 player, Petkovic reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 9 on 10 October 2011, becoming the first German female player ranked inside the top 10 since Steffi Graf in 1999.

That year, she played in the quarterfinals of three Grand Slam tournaments as well as a Premier Mandatory final at the China Open, and qualified as an alternate to the WTA Tour Championships.

Petkovic suffered three separate injuries in 2012: a back injury in January, an ankle injury in August and a knee injury in December that kept her out for nine months, and almost saw her fall out of the top 200.

She rebounded in 2014 by reaching her first Grand Slam semifinal at the 2014 French Open and later winning the WTA Tournament of Champions at the end of the season.

Petkovic has won seven WTA Tour singles titles and one doubles title, as well as nine ITF singles and three ITF doubles titles.

In April 2018, she started writing a column for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Since the beginning of her professional career, she has kept a diary at irregular intervals about her life on the WTA Tour in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a major German newspaper.