




Sania Mirza (born November 15, 1986, Mumbai, India resides in Hyderabad, India) is a professional female tennis player from India. Coached by her father, Imran Mirza, Sania began playing tennis at age six. She turned professional . She became the first and only Indian woman to reach the 4th round of a Grand Slam tournament at the US Open. She is now the highest ranked female tennis player ever from India (She had a rank of 42, her highest ever, by end of August 2005). Her original goal was to enter the top 100 by the end of 2005, but she revised it to entering the top 50 after good performances at the beginning of the year. (She may have also been helped by the fact that she has very few points to defend for this year and thus, it has been an upward journey in rankings.) As of July 2005, she ranked 5th among Asian women. Her year-end rank in 2004 was 206."My mother took me to a coach, who initially refused to coach me because I was too small," said Mirza. "After a month, he called my parents to say he'd never seen a player that good at such a young age." [From WTATour interview] She is 5 ft. 7 in. tall.She has earned a large fan following in India as she is one of the very few young women from the country to have done well at the highest levels of sport. In 2005, she was awarded the Arjuna award in tennis for the year 2004. She has defeated two top 10 players, Svetlana Kuznetsova and Nadia Petrova. She is a devout Muslim, who began playing tennis at the age of six.
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