Meet Anastasija Sevastova

While it's a fairly quiet week for the WTA, some noise came out of Southeast China Wednesday.  Unseeded Anastasija Sevastova upset #1 seed Anabel Medina Garrigues in the second round of Guangzhou, beating her 3-6, 6-3 6-1.

Who?

Anastasija Sevastova, a quickly rising Latvian 19-year old who just recently broke into the top 100 for the first time.  Since Latvians are my people, I thought I'd share a little on this rising Baltic star, and why you should keep an eye out for her in the future.

I saw Anastasia play in the Bronx Open the week before the US Open, where she beat #3 seed Petra Kvitova in the first round 6-1, 6-2.  The result didn't seem hugely shocking at the time, but now is pretty jaw-dropping in light of Kvitova's ousting of Dinara Safina in the third round of the US Open.  Beating Safina at the US Open was not as daunting a task as it should have been, but that doesn't diminish Sevastova's rout of a player who was playing well enough to get to the fourth round of a major the next week.

Since it looks like she may be hanging around the upper-middle echelons of the game for some time, here are three more things you should get to know about Anastasija Sevastova:

• Sevastova won her first $100k challenger this May in Johannesburg, not dropping a set in any of her five matches.  While the location made for a fairly weak field as far as $100k's are concerned, her emphatic 6-2, 6-2 victory over Eva Hrdinova in the final was a very respectable one.  It's by far the biggest result of Sevastova's career in terms of points earned, though it could be surpassed should her run in Guangzhou continue.
• Sevastova has a pretty comfortable hold on the title of "Best Latvian in the WTA."  At #95, she is ranked exactly 400 spots above Latvian #2 Irina Duzmina, who currently is ranked #495.
• Not only is she the top Latvian in the WTA, she's the highest ranked in all of tennis.  Since Ernests Gulbis has fallen dramatically this year, Anastasija is now the sole Latvian in the top 100 in either the ATP or WTA.  Sevastova moved ahead of Gulbis for the first time by virtue of making the second round of the US Open, which was her first time past the first round at a major.

After the jump, a YouTube clip of her in action in the finals of the Brno challenger last year, a match which she lost to my girl Zuzana Ondraskova in three tough sets.