Darija Jurak is a 24 y.o. Croatian tennis player, winner of 8 ITF singles titles and 27 ITF doubles titles, one of which she won this year. Her favorite surface is clay and current year win/loss singles record is 15-10. Her career high ranking is 188 for singles and 108 for doubles, while her current singles ranking is 413, which is the highest she's been in almost 18 months. She reached two QF's on 25k this year.
This week she's playing in Bad Saulgau 25k, where she qualified for MD (just like last year) and drew 2nd seed and world's number 208 Tereza Hladikova (CZE) as her first opponent. Since she's defending QF from last year, a loss here could push her down some 30 places in the rankings, but let's hope for the best. She applied for doubles also, not defending anything, she and her partner play against top seeds in the first round. She's playing in Germany next week as well, on another 25k where she lost in R1 last year after going through qualies, but is defending finals of doubles.
After Donna's withdrawal from women's doubles at the olympic tournament in Tokyo, it was announced today that Darija will be playing mixed doubles with Ivan Dodig.
^ Rublev is not much of a doubles player, rarely signs up at all, so despite this atp250 title from a few months back I’d say he's not that much of a threat. Pavlyuchenkova on the other hand...
Darija is the oldest player in the top 25 and the second-oldest in the top 90 (after Peschke). Awesome to see her having this kind of success at this stage in her career.