By Giri Nathan
All four of the majors now host a wheelchair tennis tournament, and the US Open has been hosting theirs since 2005. But this year, for the first time, there’s also a junior bracket, the first of its kind at any Slam. The top seed in the girls’ singles draw is Maylee Phelps, a 16-year-old from Portland, Ore. Maylee’s been busy this year, hitting the courts in France, Portugal, Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium, and her season heated up in August when she won the Pacific Northwest Sectional Wheelchair Championships. When I met her on Thursday, she’d just started her Open campaign with a smooth 6–0, 6–0 win over Germany’s Ela Porges. On her feet were the fresh kicks she custom-designed for a hospital fundraiser: gradients of hot pink, lavender, and teal; a silhouette of a wheelchair player; and a spine graphic to represent spina bifida. Nike had given her a coloring sheet to fill in, but she instead broke out the iPad “so that I could get more colors into it.”