WATCH: 1-on-1 with Serena Williams before return to singles play

When Serena Williams stepped away from tennis in 2022, she refused to use the word retirement. Instead, in a farewell essay, she said she was “evolving away from tennis.” She wanted to expand business ventures and grow her family, her second daughter was born a year after her last professional match. And still, she wrote that leaving the sport was “the hardest thing” she could imagine.

Four years later, the 44-year-old mother of two is back on the court.

Williams made her return in June, playing doubles at two tournaments. That was all in preparation for Wimbledon, where she will play singles and, alongside her sister, Venus, doubles. In the first round of singles on Tuesday, she will face 20-year-old Australian Maya Joint, who is currently ranked No. 53 in the world. The Williams sisters will take the court together on Thursday.

“I don’t need to win,” Williams said ahead of her first tournament earlier this month. “I’ve won more than most people have in their whole lives. I don’t have anything to lose. Everything is just a gain.”

Part of that gain is what it can show her children. Williams’ return to the sport is about motherhood.

By 2022, Williams had already established herself as one of the greatest tennis players of all time, broke systemic barriers in a predominantly White sport and transformed the way tennis was played. She had won 23 Grand Slam singles tournaments, 14 more in doubles and had spent 319 weeks ranked No. 1 in the world. Over nearly three decades of professional tennis, she revolutionized the women’s game with her powerful style, empowered a new generation of Black children to pursue the sport and helped redefine motherhood in elite athletics.

In a personal essay written ahead of her return to the sport, Williams said she found herself looking back not to recapture the “glory years,” but because she wondered if her daughters, ages 8 and 2, would ever see her doing what she once loved. She wanted them to fully understand who their mother was, what she accomplished and be proud.

“If I did return, it would be about experience, about sharing the moment with my kids,” Williams said in the essay. “Maybe even a small moment where I can say, ‘Look, this is what Mommy used to do.’”

Ashley Ryder, an assistant professor of sport management at Flagler College in Florida, said Williams’s return to the court challenges the idea that women, especially mothers, have an expiration date in sports.

“Too often, women become less visible as they age or after having children, and there is a societal expectation that their athletic careers should come to an end,” Ryder said.

Williams famously played and won the 2017 Australian Open while eight weeks pregnant with her first daughter. That tournament secured her record-breaking 23rd Grand Slam singles title.

Following life-threatening childbirth complications, Williams advocated for Black maternal health in the United States and publicly criticized the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and Grand Slam rules for penalizing players for taking time to have children. The WTA later amended their rules to ensure that players are not penalized for up to three years after returning from pregnancy, in part because of Williams.

Ryder pointed to other elite athletes who have advocated for better maternity policies in professional sports, including track and field star Allyson Felix, who faced a pay cut from her primary sponsor in 2017 when she became pregnant. Though progress has been made since then, Ryder said women are still often expected to choose between motherhood and their careers in ways that men are not.

“[Williams is] helping change the conversation around age, motherhood and what women are capable of,” Ryder said. “That kind of representation gives the next generation permission to dream bigger and see more possibilities for their own futures as mothers and athletes without compromising one identity for the other.”

Letisha Brown, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati, said that Williams has the star power and influence to inspire up-and-coming athletes and further expand what’s possible for athletes who become parents.

“For athletes who might not have children yet, it shows that if they decide to have a child, that doesn’t mean that their career is over,” said Brown, who also wrote a book about centering Black feminism and Black women in sports.

Brown said Williams is proving again and again that being a woman and being a mother is not a limitation.

“I think that not just in the U.S. but globally, we can better understand what it means to be a woman and how our bodies change as women over time, with or without motherhood,” Brown said. “We all grow. We all change, and that doesn’t mean that we have to stop doing the things that we love or the things that we excel at.”

Kristie Bunton, dean and professor of journalism at Texas Christian University, is a media ethics scholar who has written about Williams. Bunton said Williams’s comeback story is about parenthood, a framing that is typically only used on women, not men, Bunton pointed out. But it’s also about how far an athlete can push an aging body and how far a competitive drive can take someone.

Bunton noted that Williams is a savvy communicator and knows how to use her voice and control her own narrative by being strategic with what she says and how she says it, often choosing to pen essays in her own words.

“How journalists and sports commentators present values to us affects our understanding of ourselves and other people,” Bunton said. “Sports aren’t just games. They’re one of the few experiences people have in common today. We don’t all attend or participate or observe the same religious or cultural or political events, but many of us share sports events.”

Though there’s excitement and hype leading up to Wimbledon, Miriam Merrill, the former athletic director at Pomona College and Hamilton College, said she is curious to see how Williams’s return will be received by the media and public.

“If you think about the storied careers of men who have returned, when they returned, they just weren’t as good, and that’s OK,” Merrill said. “I do wonder if she will receive the same reception and grace if she happens to return and not be quite as successful as she was when she was younger. Because that has certainly been extended to men.”

In her farewell essay in 2022, Williams said: “I love to entertain. I’m not sure every player sees it that way, but I love the performance aspect of it, to be able to entertain people week after week.”

In that same essay, Williams said people often asked her about her legacy, but she didn’t like to focus on it. She just hoped that her career would empower women athletes to be more of themselves on the court: to play with aggression, to wear what they want, to “kick butt and be proud of it all.”

“I’d like to think that I went through some hard times as a professional tennis player so that the next generation could have it easier,” Williams wrote in 2022. “Over the years, I hope that people come to think of me as symbolizing something bigger than tennis.”