–

We didn’t see much of Bianca Andreescu late in the 2024 season.

And it appears we won’t be seeing her to begin 2025.

Andreescu, who was announced a little over a month ago as a big name for the season opening ASB Classic in Auckland, New Zealand, withdrew last week.

The tournament director, Nicolas Lamperin, said Andreescu withdrew “for personal reasons“. And when asked to elaborate, he would not.

And so Lamperin contacted Madison Keys in the middle of the celebrations for her wedding to longtime love Bjorn Fratangelo. There weren’t many options at the very last minute, with both the United Cup and the WTA in Brisbane having committed most of the top players in a packed Week 1 schedule.

The United Cup snapped up a lot of top players – including Auckland defending champion Coco Gauff, Iga Swiatek, Jasmine Paolini, Zheng Qinwen and Elena Rybakina. Brisbane has No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka along with top-10 Americans Jessica Pegula and Emma Navarro.

Plus, as a WTA 250 event held the same week as a 500 (actually, two of them) and the restrictions on top-30 players in that situation, the recent WTA Tour rule changes make it even tougher for the smaller events.

According to Stuff, Keys said no twice, before finally agreeing to play. She’ll be the No. 1 seed.

Auckland good and bad for Andreescu

It’s not the first time Andreescu has withdrawn from that event, where she made her first big breakthrough in 2019.

That year, the 18-year-old went through the qualifying, upset both Venus Williams and Caroline Wozniacki, and made it to the final before losing to Julia Goerges.

Embed from Getty Images

The following year, as the newly-minted US Open champion, she was announced to great fanfare – just a few months after the knee injury that scuttled the end of her 2019 season.

She didn’t actually return for another year – not until the 2021 Australian Open.

Andreescu was out after a first-round loss at the National Bank Open in Montreal in Aug. 2023 through to Roland Garros last May with a stress fracture in her back.

She lost in the first round in Toronto, Cincinnati, the US Open and Osaka after the Olympics this year. Andreescu did win a first-round match in Tokyo, and then got a retirement before Katie Boulter beat her 6-2, 6-1 in the quarterfinals. That was her last match of the season.

Down Under Summer a writeoff

Andreescu won’t be going to Australia at all.

There’s no announced injury. But it was clear in the matches she played in the fall that the heart was not where it should be.

And, as she turns 25 next summer and comes up on six years since that US Open title, time is racing by. When she returns again, she has to be as right as she can be – physically and mentally – to get her tennis to where it should be.

She almost certainly would have had to play the qualifying in Melbourne, and have those matches be her first in three months.

Andreescu’s agents did a good job this year in getting her wild cards. Other than Roland Garros, Wimbledon and the Olympics, the other seven events she played were on wild cards.

But that’s not a bottomless well. And with a ranking of No. 131 at the moment, there’s work to be done.

Best-case scenario would be that the Canadian returns on the Middle East swing, assuming she can get entry into those events.

If not then, perhaps Indian Wells.