The 16-year-old from Orlando, Jordan Lee, won the boys’ singles title at the 2026 World Tennis Tour Junior Finals on Sunday in Chengdu, China, defeating Slovenia’s Ziga Sesko 6-3, 7-5 to become the first American boy to claim the title since Brandon Nakashima in 2018.
The win closes out a season that already included a Wimbledon boys’ singles championship, and it came with a measure of payback. Sesko, the reigning Australian Open boys’ champion, had beaten Lee in group play earlier in the week in a three-set battle that went 6-7(5), 7-6(3), 2-6. Four days later, Lee got it back.
The World Tennis Tour Junior Finals is the junior equivalent of the ATP and WTA Finals, bringing together the eight best boys and eight best girls of the season for round-robin play followed by a knockout round.
Lee opened his week in Group A with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Puerto Rico’s Yannik Alvarez, the only American victory on the tournament’s opening day. After the loss to Sesko, he regrouped to beat Germany’s Jamie Mackenzie 6-2, 4-6, 6-4 and secure his spot in the semifinals.
There he took out Germany’s Vincent Reisach 6-3, 7-5 before turning in an identical scoreline against Sesko in the final.
🇺🇸 Jordan Lee 🇺🇸 and 🇨🇳 Sun Xinran 🇨🇳 win the titles at 2026 World Tennis Tour Junior Finals in Chengdu.
Final day report: https://t.co/7nOpWA4VfA
Results and standings: https://t.co/XDjXqwnEAu https://t.co/pjYdJSu28o— World Tennis Media Information (@worldtennispr) October 26, 2026
The title carries 1,000 junior ranking points, the same haul as a junior Grand Slam championship, along with $21,250 in travel grants from the event’s $220,000 pool. That funding is designed to help juniors manage the cost of transitioning to the professional circuit, and the ranking boost opens doors to higher-level professional tournaments in 2027 through the Junior Accelerator Programme.
Lee now joins a champions list that includes Andrey Rublev, Holger Rune and, Nakashima, a group that suggests the Junior Finals has a habit of identifying future professionals before the rest of the world catches on.
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Lee trains at the USTA National Campus in Lake Nona and is coached by his mother, Tina Lee, who oversees the high-performance junior programs at the facility.
His 2026 season has been remarkable by any measure. He won Wimbledon as a qualifier in July, becoming the first qualifier to take a junior major singles title since Noah Rubin in 2014 and doing it as the youngest player in the draw. He backed that up with a deep run at the US Open Junior Championships and a trip to the second round of men’s singles qualifying there.
Now he adds the season-ending championship, and at 16, he is only getting started.
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