Catching Up With Stacey Fung

A 2019 UW graduate, Stacey Fung closed out her senior season at Washington as a member of the All-Pac-12 Second Team, conference All-Academic Honorable Mention, and earned a final ITA singles ranking of 55 and doubles ranking of 35. 

Fung reached the NCAA singles championship in three straight seasons, becoming just the third Husky to qualify in three consecutive years. 

We recently caught up with Fung, who is now traveling the world while living her dream of playing professional tennis. 

What were some of your major highlights of 2023?

I won three tournaments this year, so that was really exciting — it helps your ranking shoot up when you’re able to make deep runs in tournaments. 

These tournaments have been all over the world. The first one was in Santo Domingo — in the Dominican Republic — the second was in Tbilisi, Georgia, and then in Wichita, Kansas, so tennis has taken me all over. 

This might be hit or miss as a milestone, but I ended up being three out of the US Open. Based on rankings I was the third alternate. It was a great and also very devastating week, in the sense of missing out on such a big, historic event, but I ended up spending the week in New York training with a lot of the top players on tour. 

Being in that environment made me realize these are the type of tournaments I want to be competing in. You really can’t complain about being in the gym, training beside top 10 players. I remember being that much more motivated coming back home to Vancouver. Just putting my head down and getting back to work. I saw what I needed to improve on and knew that all of the little details I put in would add up.

Later that month, I played in my first WTA 1000 in Guadalajara, Mexico — a WTA 1000 is the level below Grand Slams. I ended up losing in the first round, in a tough three set match against a top 30 player in the world. So I had a lot of really great takeaways from that week.

Those were some of the biggest things on the tennis side for me this year, but I’ve also had to shift my mindset in the sense of — this is a job but also a business. 

I’m starting to sign some corporate contracts so it’s getting quite exciting off court as well. The main focus is tennis, improving my ranking, and staying healthy, but there are a lot of fun things that come along with it. 

Unfortunately, I didn’t end up competing in the Pan American games, but I was selected to represent Canada which is an honor. I was struggling…