Victoria Duval's Emergence Is Great for Women's Tennis

Just when you start to wonder how much longer Serena Williams can carry women's tennis, Victoria Duval emerges.

The 17-year-old upset No. 11 Samantha Stosur in the first round of the 2013 US Open. Duval is the 296th-best women's singles player in the world and the 27th-best American.

It would have been incredible enough if that was the end of the story. Then it came out that her father, Jean-Maurice, was buried alive during the massive earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010, via Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News. Jean-Maurice Duval lived, and was in attendance to see his daughter pick up the biggest victory of her career. It's the kind of story that if you saw it on the Hallmark Channel, you would dismiss as too sappy.

Duval's win is one of the reasons we watch sports. You can't get moments like this anywhere else.

For women's tennis, it's exactly the kind of injection needed for the future, as the Williams sisters—Venus in particular—continue to get older and decline.

Tennis isn't the sport it was in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Back then, you had a much deeper talent pool, and you felt there was legitimate rivalry between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, Monica Seles and Steffi Graf, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl, John McEnroe and everybody.

Stories like Duval's are what tennis needs to survive. Fans have plenty of other options when it comes to their sporting interests. They need captivating reasons in order to watch tennis. Otherwise it's just two people hitting a fluorescent ball back and forth, over and over again, and sometimes one person misses.

Duval has provided that necessary excitement into the US Open. You don't often see Lil Wayne and Amare Stoudemire going to Twitter to talk about what just happened on the court.

Maybe there's some people who heard about the young sensation and decided to read more about the sport, and then that leads to them becoming a fan. Maybe they're coming back to tennis after getting bored years ago. The sport grows either way. That's what something like that upset can do.

It's way too early to call Duval the savior of women's tennis, or the next great American female. She's still a teenager and much less experienced than Sloane Stephens was when she upset Serena Williams at the Australian Open.

With Duval, you do get the feeling, though, that this could be a talented player. This isn't some flash-in- the-pan who's peaked after one match, and it's all downhill from here.

B/R's Merlisa Lawrence Corbett has a great breakdown of how Duval is not going to follow in the path of Melanie Oudin. Oudin beat Maria Sharapova at the 2009 US Open and made it to the quarterfinals. Since then, she's failed to recreate that magic and is ranked No. 134.

You see a lot of potential in Duval. She's got the talent to hang around. The biggest thing now is that she doesn't get too big a head, or overwhelmed by the expectations.

The latter isn't up to her, but in terms of the former, she shouldn't have any trouble. With her backstory, you'd think Duval will remain grounded enough not to get too ahead of herself. She knows what kind of work she has to put in in order to become one of the best players in the world.

If that happens, women's tennis could have the best thing to come to the sport in years.