Serena Williams will make her Grand Slam return at Wimbledon later this month.
Along with her sister Venus, Williams has been granted a wild card entry to the Wimbledon women’s doubles draw, the All England Tennis Club announced Tuesday morning. The 23-time Grand Slam singles winner, seven of which came at Wimbledon, last played at the grasscourt tournament in 2022.
Williams, 44, made her official return to professional tennis earlier this month at the HSBC Championships, a WTA 500 event known as a Wimbledon warmup. She played in one doubles match—a June 9 win alongside world No. 9 singles player Victoria Mboko.
However, Mboko, 19, sustained a knee injury the next day during singles action that forced her to drop out of the competition, prematurely ending Williams’s doubles run. Williams is set to play another doubles event Tuesday, teaming up with world No. 10 singles player Karolína Muchová at the Berlin Open.
Williams has won 16 doubles Grand Slam titles—14 in women’s doubles and two in mixed doubles. The Williams sisters won six Wimbledon doubles titles together between 2000 and 2016.
It’s not yet clear if the Williams sisters will play singles at Wimbledon, where one singles wild card slot remains. World No. 21 Maja Chwalińska, the Polish star who jumped nearly 100 spots in the rankings after a miraculous run to the finals at Roland-Garros earlier this month, was given a singles wild card Tuesday.
A top-25 player is normally ranked for Grand Slam tournaments, but because the entry lists for Wimbledon are finalized in mid-May, Chwalińska’s previous ranking was considered.
Chwalińska was outside the top 100 and would’ve had to go through the qualifying round just to try to make the main draw in London.
In 2022, Williams said she was “evolving away from tennis” after the US Open. But in late 2025, tennis journalist Ben Rothenberg reported that she had re-entered the ITIA’s drug testing portal. Retired players must be in the portal for six months before they are allowed to return to professional tennis.
Williams has yet to give a firm reason for why she decided to return. After her match at Queen’s Club, she joked that she has “nothing better to do.” She also said that feels little pressure to win titles or prove anything on the court during her return: “I don’t have anything to lose, and everything here is just to gain.”
