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The pivot to pickleball has been somewhat of an adjustment for Canadian tennis star Genie Bouchard.

But she never said she was done with tennis.

And so, with little warning, the 30-year-old is in the draw for a $60,000 ITF event in Zephyr Hills, Fla. outside Tampa.

Bouchard also said, in a chat with her Instagram fans, that she plans to play the National Bank Open this summer in Toronto.

All of that comes as great news for her still-devoted cadre of fans.

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First opponent: Justina Mikulskyte

Bouchard’s first opponent in Zephyr Hills will be the No. 6 seed, Justina Mikulskyte of Lithuania.

Mikulskyte, 28, was a top-50 player in the juniors a decade ago. She is playing the best tennis of her career and sits near a career high in the WTA Tour rankings at No. 224. She has never played a main draw at a Grand Slam tournament.

Bouchard also is playing doubles with Fanni Stollar of Hungary.

It will be Bouchard’s first singles match since she lost to Veronika Kudermetova at the WTA 1000 in Guadalajara, Mexico last September. Bouchard had been gifted a wild card into the main draw at that tournament.

With her ranking dropping, Bouchard either played qualifying at tournaments in 2023, or managed to get wild cards.

She fell in qualifying both in Auckland and at the Australian Open (she used a protected ranking for that tournament) to start the season. And then she didn’t play until April, where she took a wild card into the WTA 250 at altitude in Bogotá, Colombia.

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Then, a wild card into the $100K ITF in Oeiras, Portugal before she qualified and won a round at the WTA 1000 in Madrid. Those points dropped off her ranking Monday, which puts that number at No. 466.

Bouchard didn’t win that many matches in 2023. But she did beat some decent players and when she lost, she was usually competitive even if she was carrying a nagging knee injury.

It ended in September. And then … nothing until she finally made her pickleball debut in mid-January.

(She did play some doubles in the course of Canada’s Billie Jean King Cup triumph last November).

Struggles on the pickleball court

She finally won her first match in early April, in mixed doubles against 53-year-old Canadian former seniors tennis player Steve Deakin and his 38-year-old partner Michelle Esquivel. It hasn’t been going … great – unlike a number of players who have made the switch from tennis and found success fairly quickly.

The @RoddyPFN & @geniebouchard pairing off to a good start with a win on Center Court to kick off the mixed doubles bracket. Looked strong and consistent through the match, taking it 11-5 11-3 @PPAtour pic.twitter.com/9thO9AujK1

— Doctor J (@yerdmeh) April 2, 2024

For an athlete who has played before sold-out stadiums, it has to be a pretty big adjustment although, of course, it’s all about the benjamins.

Here she is playing fellow Quebec Catherine Parenteau last month.

Parenteau, who is six months younger than Bouchard and also a transplanted Floridian from Montreal, played junior tennis and then at the University of Arizona and Michigan State. So they probably ran into each other when they were little kids. She played a few pro tournaments when she was of junior age. But never after that.

She’s been playing pickleball since 2016 and is one of the top players they have.

ITF level a slog for Bouchard

It was often said of Bouchard as her tennis ranking was dipping – it’s said of a lot of players in her situation – that she “needed to go back down to the ITF level to get matches, wins and confidence.”

But it has never been a happy place for her. And why would it be? A decade ago (hard to believe, but true), she was having the best season of her career. But when the struggles began, the ITF circuit was no panacea.

Bouchard didn’t play at that level from the end of 2012 until April, 2017, when she entered an $80,000 event in Indian Harbour Beach, Fla as a wild card. She hadn’t won a match since the Australian Open that January.

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The Canadian nearly lost in the first round, pulling out a three-set win over the obscure world No. 601 and losing in the quarterfinals to Victoria Duval, ranked No. 896. Just a month later, though, she upset Maria Sharapova at the WTA 1000 in Madrid in a match that will go down as one of the best of her career.

In 2019, on the way home from Australia, she played a WTA 125 tournament in Newport Beach. She reached the quarterfinals, but went down to a young Bianca Andreescu in arguably one of the worst efforts of her career. And she went underground for months after that.

In 2020, at the same tournament, she went down 6-2, 6-1 in the first round to American Alexa Glatch, a former top junior who struggled with multiple knee surgeries during her pro career.

Bouchard met Glatch again late that year at an $80K in Macon, Georgia, and defeated her. But she retired from her next match against Katie Volynets with an abdominal injury, down a set and a break in the second.

To sum up, since she aged out of the juniors, Bouchard has a 6-8 record at the ITF level. It’s a lose-lose situation for a player with Bouchard’s CV – the pressure of being “expected” to win against players who haven’t had her career makes those matches exponentially difficult.

Perhaps now, with literally almost nothing to lose, that pressure is off and Bouchard can show what she’s capable of.