Who is Serena Williams’ husband Alexis Ohanian? (Getty Images)

Serena Williams is returning to professional tennis. The 23-time Grand Slam champion, 44, has been confirmed as the wildcard entrant for the doubles event at the HSBC Championships starting June 8 at the Queen’s Club. The Queen’s Club Championship simply posted on X: “The Queen Returns.” Williams acknowledged the news on her social media with a Nike collaboration video and captioned it: “Good news travels fast.” Whether this will lead to Wimbledon or the US Open later this summer is unclear.

Is Serena Williams making a comeback to tennis?

The short answer is yes, although Serena Williams herself spent much of the last year trying to push back against that framing. After the International Tennis Integrity Agency confirmed in December 2025 that she had re-entered the sport’s anti-doping testing pool, a mandatory step for any returning professional, she took to X to shut down speculation: “Oh my God, I’m not coming back. “This wildfire is crazy.”A month later, she appeared on NBC’s Today with anchor Savannah Guthrie and remained similarly vague about her intentions.Then Sunday’s announcement came.Williams stepped back from the sport for the first time in 2022 and famously laid out her thoughts in the September issue of Vogue. “I never liked the word retirement,” he wrote. “It doesn’t seem like a modern word to me.” She described what she was doing as “evolution”, moving towards family, business and everything outside the white lines. At the time, she and her husband Alexis Ohanian had a daughter, Olympia. Their second daughter, Adira River Ohanian, arrived in August 2023.Queen’s Club has historically served as a practice tournament for Wimbledon. Whether Williams uses this as a true springboard or simply a test of where her body and game stand, Sunday’s wildcard entry made one thing clear: The development may not be over yet.

Who is Serena Williams’ husband Alexis Ohanian?

Their meeting-cute is in a movie. In May 2015, both Williams and Ohanian were living in Rome Cavalieri. Williams was there for the Italian Open. Ohanian, a tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Reddit, had come for a media conference. He sat at a pool side table that was part of Williams’ reserved section. Initially he tried to move her. He stopped. They kept talking for hours.Their first date was in Paris.id@undefined Captions not available.id@undefined Captions not available.Ohanian, now 42, was born in Brooklyn to a German mother and a father whose family fled during the Armenian Genocide. He grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, graduated from Howard High School in 2001, and later studied history and commerce at the University of Virginia, where he met Steve Huffman on the first day of freshman year. The two created Reddit in about three weeks. Sixteen months later, he sold it to Condé Nast for a reported $10 to $20 million.Since then, Ohanian has remained a prominent figure in both the tech and venture capital worlds. He has consistently been one of Williams’ strongest supporters. When he announced he would be stepping away from the sport in 2022, he wrote: “I’ve seen over the last 7 years how much you all love my wife, what she means to so many people around the world. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”He has also made public why parental leave matters to him personally. Following the birth of Olympia in September 2017, she took 16 weeks of leave and subsequently began lobbying Congress for federal paid family leave legislation. In a 2020 New York Times op-ed, he revealed that Williams almost died during childbirth, a fact that deepened his commitment to both fatherhood and advocacy.The couple married in New Orleans in November 2017. Their second daughter, Adira, was announced at the 2023 Met Gala in the most on-brand way: “Here’s three of us,” Williams told the Vogue livestream while standing on the red carpet.