Danielle Collins storms to Charleston title, extends winning streak to 13 matches in a row

Danielle Collins kept her incredible resurgence going on Sunday afternoon, storming to the Charleston title with a 6-2, 6-1 victory over Daria Kasatkina in the final of the clay-court event.

At the Australian Open in January, after a narrow second-round loss to No. 1-ranked Iga Swiatek, Collins announced that this would be the final year of her professional tennis career—but over the last few weeks, she’s become the hottest player on the women's tour.

Not only did she win Miami last week—the biggest title of her career, her first at the WTA 1000 level—but now she’s followed it up with a triumph at the WTA 500 clay-court event in Charleston.

Collins pulled off a few big things with her run on the green clay:

First of all, she extended her winning streak to 13 matches in a row—the new longest winning streak of her career. She won seven matches to win Miami and another six to win Charleston. Her previous-longest winning streak was 12 matches in a row in the summer of 2021, when she won her first two WTA titles back-to-back in Palermo and San Jose, and kept the run going into the third round of Montreal (where she narrowly lost to Jessica Pegula).

Second of all, she's now won 26 of the last 27 sets she's played. Collins lost the first set she played in Miami to Bernarda Pera, but has gone 26-1 in sets since then—she would eventually win that match, 3-6, 6-1, 6-1, didn't drop a set the rest of the way in Miami, and she only lost one set en route to the Charleston title, the middle set of her 6-3, 1-6, 6-3 second-round victory over Ons Jabeur.

And finally, she’s the first woman to win Miami and Charleston back-to-back in the same year since Serena Williams in 2013. There’s a reason it’s been 11 years since anybody’s done it—not only are they on two different surfaces, hard and green clay, but they’re big draws, with a player potentially having to play seven matches to win Miami and six to win Charleston (like Collins just did).

Collins came into Sunday’s final having won her last three rounds in straight sets—6-2, 6-2 over Sloane Stephens, 6-3, 6-4 over Elise Mertens and 6-3, 6-3 over Maria Sakkari—and she got off to a strong start against Kasatkina too, jumping out to a 3-0 lead.

It looked like Kasatkina might be building some momentum from there, as she won two of the next three games to close the gap to 4-2, but at that moment Collins shifted into an even higher gear, ripping off the next seven games in a row to build a 6-2, 5-0 lead.

Kasatkina held to get on the board in the second set but Collins served it out, coming into the net off a forehand approach on match point and then putting the volley away to seal the deal.

Collins finished the match with 37 winners to 16 unforced errors—yes, you read that right—and was an almost-flawless 17 of 19 at net.

The No. 11-ranked Kasatkina wasn’t even off her game, finishing the match with a near-even 10 winners to 12 unforced errors.

Collins, a former world No. 7, is projected to rise from No. 22 to No. 15 when the new WTA rankings come out on Monday.