Madison Keys (born February 17, 1995) is an American professional tennis player. She has been ranked as high as world No. 5 in singles by the WTA. Keys has won ten career singles titles, including a major at the 2025 Australian Open when she defeated world No. 1 and two-time defending champion, Aryna Sabalenka. She was also a major finalist at the 2017 US Open.
Keys was inspired to start playing tennis after watching Venus Williams at Wimbledon on TV. Keys turned professional on her 14th birthday, becoming one of the youngest players to win a WTA Tour level match a few months later. Keys first entered the top 100 of the WTA rankings in 2013 at the age of 17. She had her first breakthrough at a major in early 2015 when she reached the semifinals of the Australian Open as a teenager. Keys debuted in the top 10 of the WTA rankings in 2016, becoming the first American woman to realize this milestone since Serena Williams 17 years earlier. She reached the US Open final in 2017, losing to friend Sloane Stephens. Following years of injury struggles and lower results, Keys won her first major title at the 2025 Australian Open, consecutively defeating world No. 2 Iga Świątek and world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka.
Known for a fast serve and one of the most powerful forehands in the game, Keys has used her aggressive playing style to become one of the leaders of her generation of American tennis, alongside Stephens and Sofia Kenin. She has had success on all surfaces, winning at least one title on each and having reached at least the quarterfinals of all four majors.
Keys was born on February 17, 1995, in Rock Island, one of the Quad Cities in northwestern Illinois. Her parents Rick and Christine are both attorneys, and her father was a Division III All-American college basketball player at Augustana College. She has an older sister named Sydney and two younger sisters named Montana and Hunter, none of whom play tennis. Keys’ passion for tennis started at a young age. Her interest in the sport arose from watching Wimbledon on television when she was four years old. Keys asked her parents for a white tennis dress like the one Venus Williams was wearing, and they offered to get her one if she started playing tennis. Her father said that after this bargain, “All [Madison] did was try to hit balls into the next yard — home runs.”
Keys started playing tennis at the Quad-City Tennis Club in Moline. She began taking lessons regularly at seven and began competing in tournaments at the age of nine. When she was ten years old, she moved to Florida with her mother and younger sisters so that she could train at the Evert Tennis Academy founded by John Evert and also partly run by his sister, International Tennis Hall of Famer Chris Evert. At first, John said that he “thought she was very athletic, a raw talent physically. She definitely needed to be cleaned up with her strokes.” Keys noted that her game was very different when she was starting out at the academy compared to how it is as a pro, saying, “I didn’t like groundstrokes, I didn’t like long points that much, so I would just run into the net and try and volley.” Nonetheless, Keys’s coaches had high hopes for her. Chris said, “At 12 years old, she’s pretty much an all-court player; she’s not one-dimensional, which is pretty rare in this day and age.”