WHILEY Jordanne

Classification
Open (itftennis.com, 05 Feb 2020)

Origin of Impairment
Congenital (Facebook page, 01 Feb 2020)

Impairment Details
She has osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease. (Facebook page, 01 Feb 2020)

General
BREAK AND RETURN
She returned to competition in February 2019, after taking a break from the sport in order to give birth to her son Jackson in January 2018. "I love motherhood, he's such a happy, lovely, cheeky little boy. It's hard, especially when he was a baby and I was coming back into training with the lack of sleep, but I absolutely love it. I had gained two stone, I was unfit, I was worried about the logistics of travelling with a baby and worried about having to spend time away from him. It was the support of my family that helped me get going. But there was an immediate change in my tennis. In the first two tournaments, I won one and came runner-up in the other beating the top five players in the world, and I was hoping just to get through a round." She says her mother had an important role in her return to the sport. "Without her help I would have had to have retired. She helps maintain the balance for me as a mum who is also an athlete. I didn't become a mum to not be around." (bbc.co.uk, 10 Jul 2019; lta.org.uk, 22 Mar 2020)

FUTURE PLANS
She intends to retire from the sport after the 2020 Paralympic Games in Tokyo. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 she trained to become a mortgage broker. "The Paralympics have been moved back a year and that means any thoughts I had of stopping tennis have also been put back a year because I want to be in Tokyo. Tokyo is going to be my last Paralympics and it means my sporting days will be over at the age of 29 and there will be a lot of years ahead of me and I need to think about what happens next. I used the period of lockdown and the break from tennis to get the qualifications required to become a mortgage adviser because I am starting to think about life after sport. I'm such a geek, I just love mortgages, so it's exciting to have something ahead of me, but that will not dilute my ambition to finish my tennis career on a high." (tennis365.com, 10 Sep 2020)

SOCIAL ANXIETY
In early 2020 she spoke about receiving therapy for social anxiety. "My mouth shivers like I'm cold, so it makes it very difficult for me to hold a conversation. But because I'm very conscious of it, that makes my speech worse. It can become very awkward, because I can't remember what I'm saying in the conversation or it becomes very stuttered. It just sort of snowballs, because I'm aware of it, or I anticipate it's going to happen. Even though it tends to impact me most on a social level, I do overthink a lot, I get really panicky about the smallest things and I get stressed very easily." (huffingtonpost.co.uk, 03 Feb 2020)

She became the first British female wheelchair tennis player to win a Grand Slam title, when she was victorious in women's doubles alongside Japanese player Yui Kamiji at the 2014 Australian Open. She went on to become the first British female wheelchair tennis player to win a Grand Slam singles title when she claimed victory at the 2015 US Open. (lta.org.uk, 24 Jan 2014; paralympics.org.uk, 15 Sep 2016)

She and teammate Lucy Shuker became the first British female wheelchair tennis players to win medals at the Paralympic Games, when they claimed bronze in women's doubles at the 2012 Games in London. (lta.org.uk, 01 Jul 2015)