Brisbane, QLD, Australia, 8 May 2025 | Matt Trollope

In a brilliant start to 2025, Kimberly Birrell has thrived on hard courts.

She won 21 of her first 28 matches of the season, a 75 per cent winning rate after she competed for the last time on the surface at the Billie Jean King Cup Qualifiers in Brisbane.

In that same period she nearly halved her ranking, from world No.113 to No.61.

But then loomed a bigger challenge for the 27-year-old: flying to Europe to compete on clay, where wins have been harder to come by.

This might surprise, given the foundations of Birrell’s game – consistency, focus, impressive groundstroke depth, precise footwork and purposeful point construction – are associated with clay-court success.

ALEX DE MINAUR: Climbing on clay

“I don’t know why I sort of have that stuck in my head that I didn’t think I could do well on clay,” she said.

“I think it’s a bit of, like, a rhetoric that goes around amongst us Aussie girls; even when Ash [Barty] won the French Open, she was sort of saying that it was her worst surface, which is absolutely crazy.

“I think this year I’m having a really good attitude, and having that nothing-to-lose sort of vibe going into the season and we’ll see, hopefully.

“I think clay is fun, and I’ve just got to keep reminding myself of that. It can be frustrating, but it can also be fun.”

This time last year Birrell was competing on the ITF circuit in Japan, playing matches on hard and carpet courts before taking part in Roland Garros qualifying. There she fell in the second round, meaning she played just two clay-court matches for the entire year.

This season Birrell has already doubled that tally, across three clay-court tournaments so far.

She came close to upstaging 44th ranked Peyton Stearns – last year’s WTA Rabat champion on clay – in the first round in Madrid. Then she outplayed Bianca Andreescu in her opening match at the WTA 125K event in Vic, Spain. Another narrow three-set loss followed this week in Rome qualifying, to the in-form Sonay Kartal.

“I think the biggest thing for clay will be my movement and making sure that I feel confident sliding into the ball, stopping, having been balanced before I make contact. I think that’s sort of what I’ve struggled with the most,” Birrell explained.

“I think it maybe stems from just not playing on it that much at a young age … but it’s never too late for me to change that [attitude to it].”

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During her Billie Jean King Cup week in Brisbane, Birrell spent hours with Australian captain Sam Stosur, an outstanding clay-courter who reached the 2010 Roland Garros final and another three semifinals in Paris.

“Every time [clay] comes up, she’s just like, you can be great on clay, and, yeah, just believe in yourself,” Birrell said of Stosur in Brisbane. “I should chat to her a little bit more this week, maybe tonight at dinner, about the clay season.”

She added, with a smile: “Probably got to work on my kicker like Sammy’s.”

Stosur said that Birrell’s vastly improved ranking in 2025 – Birrell has since cracked the top 60 – means that tournaments like the WTA 1000 in Madrid become mandatory for her.

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“I understand the idea behind, ‘OK, it’s not a surface that I necessarily love, I haven’t played on it much and never done that well or felt comfortable on it so I’ll avoid it as long as I can. I’ll work on my ranking and different things in my game for the other parts of the year’,” Stosur told tennis.com.au.

“[But] if you’re good enough by your ranking to get into those events on the clay, be there, be part of it, embrace it for what it is. You might find something clicks and you can change how you’ve felt about it from the past, or it may even help unlock something for your game on other surfaces, too.

“The movement side of it can feel really uncomfortable and it can take time [to adapt to clay]. But one thing I said to Kim, I was like: ‘Kim, Maria Sharapova did not slide on clay and did not move very well on clay in comparison to hard court or grass, but she won the French Open twice’.

“Obviously [in Sharapova] we are talking about a great player who is a champion of the sport, but you don’t have to count yourself out because of those reasons.

“And different clay has different conditions depending where you are. You can’t think that because I played poorly on it one week in Stuttgart, that’s going to mean it’s going to follow through to Madrid, or Rome, or Strasbourg, or the French Open. They’re all that little bit different, they’ve all got their own little nuances.

“Whether you can slide or not, if you have a good sort of outlook to it, you can be OK.”

Birrell continues her clay-court season at the WTA 125 tournament in Paris next week and will then compete in Rabat, Morocco before Roland Garros begins.