張玲

English

Zhang Ling (Ling Zhang) is a Hong Kong women's tennis player who was Hong Kong's perennial No.1 from 2007 to 2018 and one of the leading figures of the territory's tennis scene. Born in Hunan province, she came to Hong Kong from the mainland in 2004. Her professional career spanned sixteen years. She won fourteen ITF Futures singles titles and seven doubles titles and was a silver medallist at the 2013 Asian Championships. She represented Hong Kong many times at the Billie Jean King Cup (formerly the Fed Cup), the Asian Games, the National Games and the East Asian Games, as a team mainstay for eleven years; at the 2018 Jakarta Asian Games she played women's singles and mixed doubles as one of the team's leading players. On 2 September 2020 Zhang announced her retirement, closing a sixteen-year competitive career after an elbow injury that an operation failed to repair. The Hong Kong Tennis Association described her as a stalwart of women's tennis and a long-standing Hong Kong representative. After retiring she became captain of the Hong Kong Billie Jean King Cup team, leading younger players in international team competition, and was appointed a Nissin Foods sports ambassador and a mentor in its youth tennis community programme. In 2023 Zhang served as coach of the Hong Kong, China women's tennis team at the Hangzhou Asian Games, moving from player to coach. Her career as both competitor and team leader reflects the handing-on of the baton from her to a new generation of Hong Kong women's players.