The busiest week in tennis? The one full of weddingsAmerican tennis player Asia Muhammad and James Cross wed last week during a busy time for tennis weddings. hongphotography / InstagramD’Arcy MaineMultiple AuthorsJul 30, 2026, 08:00 AM ET
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Asia Muhammad didn’t need to figure out a wedding date when her now-husband James Cross proposed to her last August.
While there were many — many — other details to figure out in the months ahead, picking a day was not among them. Knowing they wanted to get married in their home base of Vancouver, British Columbia, in the warmer-weather months narrowed their options down to exactly one week.
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Not to mention, Muhammad would also be having her bachelorette party and bridal shower in the days leading up to the ceremony, so there wasn’t exactly much room for flexibility.
Muhammad, who is currently ranked No. 40 in doubles and has peaked as high as No. 8, lives out of a suitcase for much of the year as part of the globetrotting and seemingly never-ending tennis schedule. While there is also a small window at the end of November following the end of the season and before preseason training begins, the packed calendar essentially leaves just one week for any tennis player who wants to get married during the traditional wedding season without missing substantial time on tour.
Muhammad is one of several tennis players who tied the knot during the week following Wimbledon, joining Daria Kasatkina, Tommy Paul, Tereza Mihalikova, Katie Boulter and Alex de Minaur — the latter two who married each other.
Because of the rigid time constraints, and knowing a proposal was coming, Muhammad, a 13-time WTA doubles champion, had informally started looking at venues before Cross even asked the question. Being from Las Vegas and knowing a lot of her family would be coming to British Columbia for the first time, and with so many friends on tour with similarly demanding schedules, Muhammad wanted the event to be perfect.
“I didn’t think he had the ring yet, so actually, I don’t know, this sounds a little crazy, but I like to be organized,” Muhammad, 35, told ESPN this week. “So I was like, ‘OK, well, I need to see what our options even are because it’s really important for us to have this weekend, this time.’ And then when we got engaged, we immediately wanted to lock down a venue for that date. It felt so rushed, but because we wanted to get married [in 2026], it had to be.”
Being organized might be the only way to successfully pull off a wedding in the middle of the tennis season.
The 2026 schedule began Jan. 2 in Australia, which meant most players from elsewhere needed to head Down Under the week prior to acclimate to the time change and the conditions. Since then, it’s been essentially nonstop with WTA and ATP tournaments in the Middle East, South America, the United States and Europe. For American players like Muhammad, it means long stretches away from home, including from April through July for the back-to-back clay and grass-court seasons.
All that to say: It leads to some very atypical wedding planning.
Some players like that their options for picking a date are limited, as it’s one less thing to have to think about.
“We really just didn’t have too many dates to choose from, so that helped,” De Minaur told ESPN ahead of the season. “We have a packed schedule, so it ultimately came down to when we had a second for ourselves. That’s how we made all of our decisions.”
But, as anyone who has gotten married knows, there are still lots of other decisions to be made, starting with the location. De Minaur and Boulter opted for a wedding in Tuscany, Italy, following an intimate and impromptu ceremony the week prior in Boulter’s hometown in England. Kasatkina and her wife, an Olympic silver-medal-winning figure skater, chose to have a destination wedding on a beach in Greece. However, Muhammad and Cross were set on staying local.
Availability helped limit their search as several popular venues in the area were already booked. By October, they had committed to holding their ceremony at a nearby botanical garden and the reception at a hotel — something Muhammad called an “ode” to her Las Vegas roots.
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But the couple quickly realized that with the demands of Muhammad’s job, they couldn’t do it on their own. Muhammad found herself reaching out to wedding planners in between practices and matches at last year’s US Open.
“I knew finding a wedding planner needed to be one of the first things we did, so I’m legit just messaging people from New York,” Muhammad mentioned. “Obviously I just need help and I’m not at home really ever.”
Muhammad, who admitted it was hard relinquishing some of the control and relying on someone else, finally found someone who she trusted. She instantly knew it was the right call when the planner started reserving things the couple would need and taking charge unprompted.
And that same planner helped with some other unorthodox aspects as well. Although typically too far out from the wedding date, Muhammad and Cross were able to do their menu tasting in February and picked out all their food months in advance. Muhammad never even had a chance to visit the ceremony site in person until the week of her wedding, relying on pictures and her planner to bring her vision to life.
Even dress shopping was a unique process. She started looking while in New York for the US Open, but nothing “felt right.” When she returned briefly to Vancouver in September, she did find — and buy — a dress she liked but then had second thoughts.
“The dress was gorgeous, but it’s like that expression, ‘Putting makeup on a pig,’ I was just trying to make it into something it wasn’t,” Muhammad mentioned.
Already knowing she wanted two dresses for the day, she later went back to the same store. She tried on a few ceremony dresses and ended up buying a new one in addition to a dress for the reception. But, as that was March and it was already a shortened window of time, and knowing she wouldn’t return to Vancouver until right before the wedding, the store developed a compressed and accelerated fitting schedule and she was able go back twice in the week before her wedding to get the dress adjusted.
But, perhaps most stressful of all, Muhammad was playing at Wimbledon — some 4,700 miles away — the week before her wedding.
She opted out of mixed doubles to alleviate one additional barrier in terms of getting home. But she was well aware of how tight things could get if she and her other doubles partner, Fanny Stollar, made it to the final, held six days before the ceremony and on the scheduled day of her first dress fitting. Acknowledging it would have been a “great problem to have,” Muhammad would have also had to fly her Las Vegas-based hairstylist to Vancouver instead of stopping there first.
Ultimately Muhammad and Stollar lost in the round of 16, allowing her to fly to Las Vegas on Wednesday, July 8. She was able to get her hair and nails done — “all the girly stuff” — by her longtime stylists, as well as pick up other supplies for the various events of the week. On Sunday, the day of the doubles final at the All England Club, Muhammad flew back to Vancouver on a 6 a.m. flight and went right from the airport to the bridal store.
On Tuesday, she went back for her second fitting — and then directly to her bachelorette party. Hosted by fellow WTA players Erin Routliffe and Alexa Guarachi — two of Muhammad’s longtime friends who tried to keep their plans for the event as secret as possible — the group drove to a lake about 45 minutes outside of Vancouver for a day of boating and other activities.
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While Routliffe and Guarachi didn’t tell Muhammad many details — at her request — they both couldn’t help sharing information with other players in the locker rooms and training rooms at tournaments.
“Sometimes I would go in to see the physios for treatment and Erin would be in there blabbing to other people and they would be talking about it, and then she would say, ‘You can’t say anything!’ to them,” Muhammad mentioned. “So other people knew, but I had no idea. It was pretty funny.”
Due to the quick turnaround between the party and the wedding, Muhammad confessed there was one other consideration that most bachelorettes likely don’t have to think about.
“I couldn’t get too blackout because I wanted my skin to be hydrated,” Muhammad, who says she rarely drinks during the season, mentioned with a laugh. “That might be the only downside to having your bachelorette the same week as your wedding. There just wasn’t enough time to recover.”
On Thursday, Muhammad and her friends headed back to Vancouver. She had her bridal shower the next morning with family and friends, followed by the rehearsal dinner that night. On Saturday, July 18, and after months of planning from all over the globe, Muhammad and Cross got married.
Only then, as she walked into the reception space after the ceremony, did Muhammad truly realize how much faith she had placed in her wedding planner — someone who had been a stranger less than a year prior — and that everything would work out.
“Even coming back for the reveal ahead of the reception, it just felt so bizarre in so many ways because I was pretty much going into it blind,” Muhammad mentioned. “Obviously, I was really particular with what I wanted and I trusted my wedding planner, but if I didn’t like it, it was way too late to do anything. So then when I walked into the room, I was blown away.
“I was literally crying. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ It just felt like a huge weight had been lifted. It was such a relief.”
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It was everything both Muhammad and Cross could have wanted.
And most special of all, they got to celebrate with many people from all different parts of their lives, together and in one room, including about 10 WTA players. It marked the second wedding of the week for Jessica Pegula, who had already attended Paul’s wedding to Paige Lorenze in New York on Tuesday.
“She was busy,” Muhammad joked.
The newlyweds’ honeymoon to South Africa will have to wait until November, but that was a blessing in disguise. After months of traveling and then having one of the most eventful weeks of her life, she was grateful to just have the time to relax and spend time with Cross.
Muhammad had seriously considered playing in this week’s Mubadala DC Open but ultimately chose to skip it. She admitted she still feels some guilt about her decision, citing the traditional tennis player mentality of “go, go, go,” but she just wanted a few days to “enjoy married life.” She will be back on tour next week in Toronto at the Canadian Open.
But for Kasatkina, Paul, Mihalikova, Boulter and De Minaur, it was back to work and back to reality. They all played this week at the 500-level event in Washington, D.C.
“It was an amazing time. [It was] everything we could have ever imagined,” De Minaur told the ATP this week about his wedding with Boulter. “It was like our own little movie. We were able to celebrate with family and friends and have a very small honeymoon, which consisted of two days.
“Then we’re on a flight here to Washington and getting our heads screwed back on and back to being tennis players.”
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