With the new transitional Billie Jean King Cup format for 2025, Team Canada will have to go through two opponents in order to reach the Finals in Shenzen, China in November. In this week’s Qualifiers, Canada is in Group A with Romania and Japan, with only the group winner advancing to the Final 8.
Like the Canadian team, both Romania and Japan are without their biggest-name player, but on paper both teams will still pose a major challenge to the 2023 champions.
With the matches just days away, let’s meet Canada’s 2025 Billie Jean King Cup Qualifiers opponents.
Romania
Date: Friday, April 11 (matches begin at midnight EDT in Canada)
Head-to-Head: Romania leads 3-0
Last Meeting: 2018 World Group II (Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Romania won 3-1
Only one of Romania’s top five players in the WTA singles rankings will be participating in the Billie Jean King Cup qualifiers, that being world no. 88 Anca Todoni. Like Canada, the Romanians are a rather young team. Every member of the squad is 26 or younger, including the 20-year-old Todoni and 19-year-old Mara Gae.
Todoni just cracked the Top 100 for the first time in her career on Mar. 17. She will be arriving in good form fresh off a WTA 125 title in Antalya, Turkey. Todoni has won eight professional singles titles, all on clay, the biggest being a trio of WTA 125s. She is the only member of the Romania team inside the Top 200 of the WTA singles rankings. Todoni is also the highest-ranked doubles player for the Romanians, albeit with a ranking of No. 298.
At 26 years of age, world No. 211 Miriam Bulgaru is the oldest member of Team Romania. She is the second-highest-ranked singles player on the team behind Todoni. Her career-high is No. 176 and she has six professional singles titles in her career, one WTA 125, all on clay.
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Georgia Craciun, Ilinca Amariei, and the youngster Gae round out the team. All three are ranked outside the Top 300 in both singles and doubles. Gae is the only member of the team with a higher doubles ranking than singles, sitting at No. 549 in doubles while she is No. 1076 in singles.
All of the Romanians have had their best results on clay in their careers. Only Craciun has won a professional singles title on hard courts.
Japan
Date: Sunday, April 13 (matches begin at 10 pm EDT on Saturday, April 12 in Canada)
Head-to-Head: Japan leads 3-1
Last Meeting: 1995 World Group relegation play-offs (Gifu, Japan), Japan won 5-0
Fun fact, the last time Canada and Japan met at the Billie Jean King Cup, only one member of this year’s Team Canada had been born.
On paper, Japan boasts the strongest team in the group. Their top two singles players, No. 51 Moyuka Uchijima and No. 104 Aoi Ito, are both ranked higher than the projected Canadian No. 1 (No. 106 Rebecca Marino). They also boast three Top 60 doubles players in Eri Hozumi, Shuko Aoyama, and Ena Shibahara.
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Uchijima is the highest-ranked singles player in the entire group. She has had a solid start to 2025, reaching the second round at both legs of the Sunshine Double last month. She has also proved to be a tough out for top players this year, pushing both Mirra Andreeva and Coco Gauff to third-set tiebreaks at the Australian Open and Indian Wells respectively. She has also picked up wins over Emma Raducanu and Jelena Ostapenko in 2025.
Ito is part of the youth movement at the Billie Jean King Cup. At 20 years old, she is projected to be the Japanese No. 2 singles player, having managed to qualify for three of the four WTA 1000s so far in 2025. She also opened the year with a title at the WTA 125 event in Canberra, Australia. Ito also was the last player to defeat Victoria Mboko at the end of 2024 before the Canadian went on her 22-match winning streak to start the new year.
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Veteran doubles players Hozumi, Aoyama, and Shibahara provide a strong insurance policy for the hosts should any tie go down to the doubles. Between them, they have 37 career WTA Tour doubles titles.
Aoyama and Shibahara in particular have a history together, having won 10 titles as a team including the 2023 National Bank Open in Montreal and reaching the 2023 Australian Open final. Notably, Shibahara and Hozumi reached three finals together in 2024, winning the title on home soil in the very venue where this week’s ties will be played, the Ariake Coliseum in Tokyo.
Feature Photo : Mathieu Belanger
