Serbia's U18 Girls Win European Team Title Without Doubles

Doubles was never played in Granville. Not once. Three times running, the same picture repeated: two singles matches, two wins, and the tie decided before anyone had to think about pairing up for a third point.

The last of those six singles was closed out by Anastasija Cvetkovic, and from the worst position she found herself in during the entire tournament. She lost the first set of her match against Hungary’s Lujza Beviz in a tiebreak, 6-7 (5-7). She then surrendered a single game across the next two sets, 6-1 and 6-0, and Serbia were European champions.

By that point Serbia were already ahead. Lana Virc opened the final against Luca Kalman and took the first set without argument, 6-1. The Hungarian hit back in the second, 4-6, but the third looked just like the first: 6-1 again for the Serbian player.

Serbia’s women’s U18 tennis team won the European title at the Summer Team Championships in Granville, France, on August 5, 2026, beating Hungary 2-0 in the final. The squad is led by head coach Lana Spremo, and Serbia arrived at the finals as top seed, a ranking they backed up with a trophy and not a single match lost along the way.

How did Serbia reach the final?

The route was short and produced the same result every time. Bulgaria fell in the quarterfinal, in a manner rarely seen in team tennis. Lana Virc beat Eleonora Toneva 6-1, 6-1, while Anastasija Cvetkovic did not concede a single game to Valerija Garnevska, winning 6-0, 6-0. Two games in the entire match, that is all Bulgaria managed to win.

The semifinal was tougher, the outcome identical. Virc beat Sofija Maresova 6-2, 6-3, then Cvetkovic beat Tereza Hermanova 7-5, 6-3 to close out the tie against the Czech Republic at 2-0. Doubles was not needed there either.

A shortened bench, and an injury the scoreline never showed

The team’s third player, Dusica Popovski, watched the entire finals from the sidelines. She was the one who earned the points that took Serbia to Granville during qualifying, but a finger injury then ruled her out of the medal matches.

The result was a shortened bench. With no singles substitute and no chance for either player to rest, Virc and Cvetkovic played all six singles matches at the finals, and won all six. Across fourteen sets, they lost only two, both of them in the final. If there is a single number that shows where Serbia actually met resistance, it is that one: the final was the only match in which Serbia lost a set at all.

There is a second detail easy to miss. Both players dropped a set in the final, and both raised their level immediately afterward, Virc to 6-1 in the third, Cvetkovic to 6-1 and 6-0. That is the kind of difference that gets punished in team tennis, where a tie built on two singles rubbers leaves no room for a mid-match dip.

Boys’ U16 team books a place in Cairo

Serbia’s junior men’s U16 team finished the same championship in sixth place, but walked away with the thing that mattered most: a spot at the Junior Davis Cup in Cairo, from November 2 to 8.

Head coach Ladislav Demeter and his players Pavle Stojiljkovic, Igor Peric, and Luka Kostic drew the tournament’s host and top seed right away, in the quarterfinal.

• Quarterfinal, France won 3-0: Pablo Predo beat Kostic 6-0, 6-1; Benoa Geldof came from behind to beat Stojiljkovic 4-6, 6-2, 6-3; then the doubles pair of Debril and Predo beat Kostic and Peric.
• Play-off, Serbia beat Romania 2-1: Peric lost to Andrej Radu 6-2, 7-5; Stojiljkovic beat Darius Dorin 3-6, 6-3, 7-5; the doubles pair of Peric and Stojiljkovic settled the tie 3-6, 6-1, 11-9.
• Fifth place match, Italy won 2-0: Danijel Longo beat Peric 6-4, 7-5; Zeno Roveri beat Kostic 6-3, 6-2.

The match against Romania carried the trip to Egypt, and it was decided in a deciding doubles tiebreak, 11-9. The loss to Italy came a day later and no longer affected the championship standings, since the Cairo spot was already secured.

What stays with Serbia from Granville is not only the trophy. A team that wins six singles out of six at the finals, without its third singles player available, is not usually a one-off story, but a generation likely to be seen again together on the senior lists. The first concrete date on the calendar for Serbian junior tennis is November 2, when the Junior Davis Cup begins in Cairo.