Alex Eala slowly becoming more versatile, complete player

Many analysts have said Alex Eala will find it hard to win big tournaments and high-profile matches with her serve.

Those criticisms may be overblown.

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“I think my serve can be uncomfortable [for opponents],” Eala said late Sunday in Washington after her victory over Naomi Osaka in the Mubadala DC Open semifinals.

After a rain delay that pushed the final to Tuesday, Eala raised the trophy after beating top seed Jessica Pegula, 4-6, 6-4, 6-0, for her first WTA Tour-level title.

The marked improvement of her service game against Osaka suggests Eala is on her way to being a complete player—both technically and mentally.

“I think I tried to play around a lot with variety. Of course, it would be great if I had a serve that went 200 kilometers per hour,” Eala told reporters in Washington.

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To compensate for her lack of power, Eala has constructed a service game that incorporates all the “weapons in my bag,” including one of the most elite returns in the women’s tour.

“[I]t’s a process,” Eala said of her improving service game. “Maybe I will one day serve 200. You never know. But I like to look at it as a multidimensional thing. And I have a variety of weapons in my bag. So I think it’s also a good thing that I don’t rely on my serve alone.

“Although I’m standing by [my belief that] it is dependable.”

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Against Osaka, for instance, Eala may not have won points off her serve, but she was pretty efficient behind her service game. Even her second serve, which is always the weaker of a player’s serves, produced a high rate of points.

Eala won nine of 10 points behind her second serve in the opening set, for a whopping 90 percent success rate, before finishing the match at 15 of 19, or 78.9 percent. She won 10 of 16 points behind her first serve in the opening set (62.5 percent) and 10 of 12 (83.3 percent) in the second.

“I’ve said before that every game is an opportunity, especially when it’s your serve, you know,” the 21-year-old ace said. “When you serve, you start the point. So that’s kind of the advantage that you have.”

Eala also takes a grounded approach toward her game, making sure she doesn’t put too much focus on what her ranking is—the Filipino star is set to enter the top 25 of the women’s world rankings but admits that she doesn’t track her year-end spot strictly.

“I look at rankings from time to time [but] it’s not like something I’m checking after every match,” Eala said. “I’m lucky enough to say that at this point, where I feel it kind of tapers off [and] the higher you go, the steeper [the climb] gets. I feel like every spot I move [to], it’s a big gap [to the next spot].

“So I think my main focus is to win more matches,” she added. [A]nd obviously the priority is kind of the level that I produce in such matches. And I think if I’m able to reach those levels at a consistent kind of pace, then of course the ranking will follow.”