Lucia Bronzetti angle omitted due to fact limits

Yasmine Kabbaj beat Berfu Cengiz 7-6, 6-3 in Rabat on Tuesday to become the first Moroccan player to win a match on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz since 2011. The wild card from Morocco, ranked No. 334, advanced in the Grand Prix SAR La Princesse Lalla Meryem and ended a 15-year gap for Moroccan women at tour level.

Rabat and the 2011 gap

Kabbaj is now the fourth Moroccan woman to win a tour-level match in the Open Era. The last Moroccan woman before her to do it was Nadia Lalami, who reached the Fès quarterfinals in 2011.

Her win came on the same day Sada Nahimana continued a separate run of firsts for Burundi in Rabat, but Kabbaj’s result carried the clearest national marker: a home player winning a WTA match for the first time in 15 years. That makes the opening round in Rabat more than a single result; it reset a number that had been stuck since 2011.

Yasmine Kabbaj’s recent rise

The Rabat victory followed Kabbaj’s first career Top 100 win last month over Diane Parry in the Saint-Malo WTA 125 first round. She also made her WTA main-draw debut as a wild card in Rabat in 2024, giving the win on Tuesday a direct line back to the same event where she first entered the main draw.

Berfu Cengiz pushed the first set to a tiebreak before Kabbaj closed the match in straight sets. The scoreline, 7-6, 6-3, left Kabbaj with a place in the next round and Morocco with a result that had not arrived from one of its women since 2011.