Aoi Ito: Tennis as a Video Game

At the end of 2023, Aoi Ito was ranked No. 417 in the world. By the end of 2024 she was inside the top 130, with a 67-25 record for the year, a semifinal at a WTA event in Osaka where she beat Sofia Kenin and Elisabetta Cocciaretto, and a reputation as one of the most unusual players on tour. She had done all of this without power, without an academy background, and with a game built almost entirely on tactics and touch.

She is twenty years old, from Aichi, Japan, and she sees tennis in a way that is worth paying close attention to.

Where the Game Came From

Ito grew up in a tennis family in the most informal sense: her parents played recreationally and her older sister played first, so Aoi followed. There was no structured development plan, no academy pathway. She started at five years old and skipped most of the junior circuit. Her father, a former prosecutor, became her coach. Her mother manages everything else, including travel arrangements, meals, massages, and mental support.

“My father teaches me tactics in tennis and my mother supports me with various things like making arrangements for tennis trips, meals, massages, mental care and so on. So there’s no cost at all!”

It is a lean, self-contained operation. And it has produced a player whose game looks like nothing being produced anywhere else.

No Power, No Problem

Ito is small and not physically powerful. She does not try to be. The entire architecture of her game is built around that reality, and she is entirely at peace with it.

“As you can see, I have no physical strength. So I always look for the technique to win against a better player, not power. That’s why I use various shots to control a match. The most important thing is tactics for me.”

Her weapon is the forehand slice, used from both wings, for both attack and defence. It produces low, skidding balls with an awkward trajectory that most players have barely practiced against. She layers in sharp angles, changes of pace, and variations in height, not because a coach designed a system around these things, but because she found, through her own exploration, that they worked.

When she reached the semifinals in Osaka, she reflected on what that result had confirmed for her:

“My play-style is tricky. Through this tournament, I am more confident that my play-style can be world-class.”

She had not expected the result. She had qualified just to be in the main draw.

“Actually, I didn’t expect to get a good result in Osaka. I am really happy I got into the main draw, then got into the semifinals.”

That combination, genuine surprise alongside deep confidence in the style itself, says something about how she thinks. She is not performing humility. She is describing, accurately, a player who arrived without expectations and found out something important about her own game.

The Underdog by Choice

Ito’s relationship with pressure is worth noticing. She prefers being the underdog not because she lacks confidence, but because she has learned something honest about herself.

“I think I am a person who can think negatively. If I set a goal too high, I will lose my motivation and give up easily. So I like to be the underdog. But just be careful, I will sometimes bite!”

That freedom from expectation seems to be where her game breathes. She describes competition not as a battle to endure but as something closer to play.

“I want to be natural on court. I might as well have fun if I am going to do it! I feel like I am playing a tennis video game when I play in real life.”

And when opponents get frustrated with her unusual game, she does not feel bad about it.

“I really love to see that! That’s my play-style!”

That last line opens up something worth thinking about. Most of the time we spend developing in tennis is focused on our own game, our serve, our footwork, our patterns. But how much time do we spend on understanding how to disrupt the person on the other side of the net? Ito has built her entire game around that question. And it is worth asking how you even practise that, given that disruption only exists in relation to a real opponent, not a ball machine or a drill.

What Her Game Makes Me Think About

What I find most interesting about Ito is not just the style itself. It is the fact that she arrived at this style through a process that was almost entirely self-directed and family-driven, and that she sees no reason to be apologetic about any of it.

“I don’t care at all whether I play like everyone else or not. I am doing this because it’s necessary.”

There is something worth sitting with there. She is not playing an unusual game because nobody corrected her or because she never had access to proper coaching. She is playing it because she and her father looked at who she is, what she has, and what the game requires, and they built a system that fits. The unconventional style is not an accident. It is a conclusion.

And it is producing results. At a time when women’s tennis is increasingly shaped by power and heavy topspin, a twenty-year-old with no physical strength reached the WTA top 130 by making opponents deeply uncomfortable in ways they had almost no experience handling.

Her goal for the future is equally revealing. When asked which player she would most want to face, she said:

“I have no special player I want to have a match with. I think my play-style will evolve by playing with various types of players. But if I had to pick one, I would choose ME!!”

It is a strange and perfect answer. She is not measuring herself against anyone else on tour. She is measuring herself against a better version of her own game.

That is also a coaching question worth asking. How often do we design development environments that help players find more of themselves, rather than environments that move players towards a standard someone else defined?

For more on this, see The Player Comes First

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