Transylvania Open crowned as the world's best WTA 250 tournament

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) hails Cluj-Napoca’s Transylvania Open as the best WTA 250 tournament of the year, only in its second season. The award, which was decided by votes from the WTA player body, honors the tournament’s tremendous amount of hard work put in by the team.

“THIS IS CRAZY! We are officially named the best WTA 250 tournament in the world! This was voted by the players at the year-end WTA Awards! I am so proud about this, our team deserves it big time! Thank you to everyone involved,” Patrick Ciorcila, the head of the tournament, said in an Instagram post.

Additionally, the best WTA 500 tournament of the year award went to Charleston Open, while the Indian Wells Masters in California was crowned as the best WTA 1000 tournament.

The Transylvania Open took place at BTarena in Cluj-Napoca from October 10 to 16, 2022. Russian starlet Anna Blinkova wrote her name in the history book after snatching her first career singles title by defeating Jasmine Paolini in the single’s final, winning it as a qualifier.

In the double category, Kirsten Flipkens (BEL) and Laura Siegemund (GER) got the best of Kamilla Rakhimova and Yana Sizikova (RUS) in a solid two-set final game.

“The Transylvania Open by Verdino was a great event with super nice staff and really original ideas to make sure the players had fun around the tournament and the city in general,” says Siegemund.

In its previous edition, the Transylvania Open was only four votes away from winning the best WTA 250 tournament title behind Melbourne and Tenerife.

A new sporting tradition in the city of Cluj-Napoca, Ciorcila said that his goal would be upgrading the tournament to a 500 category.

“This is a goal for us this year, to create the best experience for everyone involved. In the future, the biggest challenge is to find the proper financing through sponsors and other forms of income … We would like to upgrade this tournament to a 500 category, this would be a challenging goal, but at this point, the Romanian market is not ready for such an expensive event,” he told Romania Insider in a September 2022 interview.