Victoria Mboko, 18, scores breakthrough Miami Open win

What’s the biggest difference between the major and minor leagues of pro tennis? For Canada’s Victoria Mboko, it may have been deciding which fans in the Miami Open crowd she was going to listen to on Wednesday.

“I felt like in the match, a lot of the crowd was against me,” the 18-year-old said of the fans, many of whom waved the flag of Colombia in support of Mboko’s opponent, Camila Osorio. “I’m kind of proud that I blocked all that noise out and kind of focused on myself more.”

“There were a lot of Canadians, too. I was kind of letting them in my head more.”

Whether the fans were for her or against her, the audience on Court 1 in Miami was likely bigger and louder than the ones she’s accustomed to hearing. Mboko, ranked 162nd at the moment, has spent her 2025 playing the ITF Circuit in the Caribbean, Europe, and the States. “Playing” isn’t really the right word for what she’s been doing there, though. “Steamrolling” is closer to the mark.

Starting the second week of January, Mboko won her first 25 matches of the year, all without dropping a set, claiming titles in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Rome (Georgia), and Manchester (Great Britain). After losing a match in France, she won another title in Portugal. On Wednesday, as a wild card in Miami, Mboko made the transition to the WTA level and won again, 7-5, 5-7, 6-3, over the 54th-ranked Osorio.

So what’s going on with this teenager who finished each of the last two seasons ranked 333rd in the world? First, she’s pain-free for the first time in a couple of years. Knee issues plagued her in 2023 and 2024, and she spent much of that time training on clay to avoid high-impact hard courts. She also spent as much time “focused on my recovery” as she did focused on her game.

During this off-season, though, she trained with her Tennis Canada coaches in Montreal, and felt healthy enough to make progress again.

“We were working pretty hard on my on-court fitness,” Mboko told the Match Point Canada podcast. “I was feeling pretty confident going into the tournaments in the Caribbean. I was feeling pretty loose.”

Still, she didn’t have a 25-match win streak on her bingo card.

“If I had told myself, ‘You’re going to win three tournaments in a row,’ I’d be like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Mboko said she worked on upping her aggressiveness, and the faster-surfaced indoor tournaments she played early in the year helped her get used to taking control of rallies earlier. But it was the lack of pain in her knee, even on hard courts, that mattered most to her, and made her “even happier than winning.”

Mboko showed off a naturally, precociously explosive game in Miami. She bailed herself out with strong serves, counterpunched with her backhand, sent Osorio scrambling with her forehand, and made use of a deft drop shot that she wasn’t afraid to go to in tight situations. It was Mboko, rather than the more experienced Osorio, who won the tight first set, fought to make the second set close, and played better when the match was on the line in the third.

She also seemed to have a sense for when to turn it on.

“I felt like, whoever is just a little bit more quick and on there in the beginning of the third set [will have the advantage],” she said. “I kind of put more emphasis on that.”

Mboko noticed a difference between ITF and WTA competition, but rather than intimidating her, it served as a spur to her own game.

“I feel like I have to hit a little bit harder of a pace compared to ITF level,” she said. “They’re a lot smarter, they exploit your weaknesses a lot earlier. It kind of forces you to get your bad side going.”

Mboko was born in Charlotte, N.C., and has two older siblings who played tennis at Division I schools in the States.

“I kind of grew up watching them practice from the sidelines,” she says, “and I didn’t want to get left out of the fun.”

I kind of grew up watching [tennis] from the sidelines, and I didn’t want to get left out of the fun. Victoria Mboko

But Mboko credits Tennis Canada for training her, and the tight-knit group of fellow players from her country for supporting her. She has started to find the tour a little “lonelier” than she did as a junior, but that certainly hasn’t hurt her game this season.

Next, Mboko will take another step up, all the way to the brink of the Top 10, when she faces 11th-ranked Paula Badosa. She doesn’t sound fazed by that either. Instead she sounds thrilled to find herself at the center of the sport, after two years in injury purgatory.

“I’m really excited for that,” Mboko says of playing Badosa. “It’s not an opportunity you get most of the time.”