Wild cards in Rabat changed the record books Tuesday: Home hope Yasmine Kabbaj won the first Moroccan WTA Tour match victory since 2011, while Sada Nahimana became Burundi’s first player to beat a Top 100 opponent.
Tuesday’s tennis in Rabat didn’t just produce winners. It produced milestones.
On the main courts. two wild cards—neither seeded into the tournament’s script—turned their first-round matches into national history. Home hope Yasmine Kabbaj became the first Moroccan player to win a match on the WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz since 2011. She did it by beating Berfu Cengiz 7-6(4), 6-3.
For Kabbaj, the moment landed with the weight of context. She is ranked No. 334, yet she is only the fourth Moroccan woman to win a tour-level match in the Open Era. The others were Habiba Ifrakh, Bahia Mouhtassine, and most recently Nadia Lalami, who made the Fès quarterfinals in 2011.
The 22-year-old—an alumna of San Diego State—entered the WTA main draw as a wild card at Rabat 2024. She had already been building toward this day: last month, she recorded her first career Top 100 victory over Diane Parry at the Saint-Malo WTA 125 first round.
Her next headline is already written in numbers. Kabbaj’s career high is No. 331, and she is currently the third-highest ranked Moroccan woman in WTA history, behind Mouhtassine (who peaked at No. 139 in 2002) and Lalami (who reached No. 322 in 2011).
Then the second milestone arrived from across the border. Sada Nahimana, a familiar name for history in Rabat, became the first player from Burundi to score a victory over an opponent ranked in the Top 100. She earned it with an upset of Ajla Tomljanovic, winning 6-3, 7-5.
Nahimana’s win carried added electricity because she has been building toward it in the same setting. She has already made firsts for her country in Rabat: she became the first player from Burundi to compete in a WTA main draw here in 2023. Two years later. in 2025. she became the first Burundian to win a tour-level match by defeating Aya El Aouni to make the second round.
This time, the opponent was different—Tomljanovic, a three-time Grand Slam quarterfinalist. Nahimana’s performance included a sharp element of touch and timing, particularly shown in her drop shot. It ended as what she described by results rather than words: the best performance of her career.
At 25 years old, she is currently ranked No. 231 after strong performances over the past two months. Across Nahimana’s four prior tournaments, she reached the finals of the Bujumbura W50 and Platja d’Aro W35, then the semifinals of the Zagreb W75 last week.
A third wild card also made noise, this one with a comeback that refused to finish quietly. Nineteen-year-old Ukrainian Yelyzaveta Kotliar, ranked No. 528, claimed her first tour-level win with a remarkable rally against Francesca Jones. After trailing 4-0 in the third set, Kotliar roared back to win 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 in 2 hours and 20 minutes.
The sequence from Tuesday’s matches felt simple only at the scoreboard level: wild cards stepped into the draw. then left the records reshaped. Kabbaj’s victory ends a long national wait for a Moroccan WTA Tour match win since 2011. Nahimana’s upset turns a Top 100 win into something her country can finally claim for the first time.
And in Rabat, where these stories usually arrive as footnotes, they landed as headlines.
Rabat WTA Yasmine Kabbaj Berfu Cengiz Sada Nahimana Ajla Tomljanovic Burundi Morocco wild cards