{"id":46030,"date":"2026-04-02T12:04:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T12:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=46030"},"modified":"2026-04-02T12:04:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T12:04:26","slug":"pegula-wins-charleston-opener","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=46030","title":{"rendered":"Pegula wins Charleston opener"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Defending champion and top seed Jessica Pegula labored more than three hours to reach the round of 16 at the WTA Charleston Open on Wednesday with a 4-6, 6-4, 7-5 victory over Yulia Putintseva.<\/p>\n<p>Pegula, the world number five from the United States, had clawed back a set but was broken to trail 0-2 in the third before mounting a final fightback.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;All I just kept thinking was, like, welcome to the clay court season,&#8221; Pegula said after grinding out the win on Charleston&#8217;s green clay.<\/p>\n<p>Pegula, who enjoyed a first-round bye, said the breezy conditions and challenging shadows made it hard to respond aggressively to the high, looping shots from 72nd-ranked Putintseva of Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s a really tricky opponent in general,&#8221; Pegula said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I feel like especially on clay she can be really crafty, use high balls, low balls, slices, drop shots, and I felt like she was just honestly toying with me there for quite a while,&#8221; added the American, who was broken as she served for the match at 5-4 but broke back to give herself another opportunity to close it out.<\/p>\n<p>Pegula is chasing her second title of the year, after a victory in Dubai in February.<\/p>\n<p>Second-seeded Ekaterina Alexandrova withdrew from the tournament before her second-round opener on Wednesday, saying she had &#8220;a bit of an injury&#8221; picked up in Miami.<\/p>\n<p>The 13th-ranked Russian was replaced in the draw by Ekaterine Gorgodze of Georgia.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Defending champion and top seed Jessica Pegula labored more than three hours to reach the round of 16 at the WTA Charleston Open on Wednesday with a 4-6, 6-4, 7-5 victory over Yulia Putintseva. Pegula, the world number five from the United States, had clawed back a set but was broken to trail 0-2 in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46030\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}