mixed doubles at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Barty was an all-court player with a wide variety of shots. Despite her short stature for a professional tennis player, she was an excellent server, regularly ranking among the WTA Tour's leaders in aces and percentage of service points won. She serves as the National Indigenous Tennis Ambassador for Tennis Australia. Barty announced her retirement from tennis in March 2022, two months after her Australian Open title and still ranked No. 1 in singles at the time, having held the ranking for all but four weeks between June 2019 and April 2022 when she relinquished the ranking. Her 114 consecutive weeks at No. 1 (not including when rankings were frozen between March and August 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic) is the fourth-longest streak in WTA history. Early life and background Ashleigh Jacinta Barty was born on 24 April 1996 in Ipswich, Queensland to Josie and Robert Barty. Her father grew up in the rural North Queensland town of Bowen where he became a Queensland and Australian representative in golf and later worked for the State Library of Queensland. Her mother is the daughter of English immigrants, was a state representative for Queensland in golf in her younger years, and began working as a radiographer after retiring from golf. Through her great-grandmother, Barty is a member of the Indigenous Australian Ngaragu people, the Aboriginal people of southern New South Wales and northeastern Victoria. She grew up in Springfield, a suburb of Ipswich, Queensland, and attended Woodcrest State College throughout her upbringing. She has two older sisters named Sara and Ali. Besides tennis, Barty also played netball as a child, but decided to focus on tennis because she "thought netball was a girls' game" and because her sisters were better than her at that sport. She did not play cricket while growing up. Barty started working with her longtime junior coach Jim Joyce at the West Brisbane Tennis Centre at the age of four. Joyce remarked that he did not typically train children as young as Barty, but made an exception because of her excellent hand-eye coordination and high level of focus. He recalled a moment from their first lesson, saying, "The first ball I threw to her, bang! She hit it right back.” As a child, Barty also practised at home, remembering, "I used to hit the ball against [the wall exterior