By Vivian Lassiter
BUFFALO — Some athletes carry their hometown on their sleeve. Jessica Pegula carries hers into the biggest stadiums in tennis, and next week she takes it to the desert one more time.
The Buffalo-born star, born here on Feb. 24, 1994, has qualified for the WTA Finals at Indian Wells Tennis Garden, which run Nov. 8 through 15. It is her fifth straight trip to the season-ending championship for the top eight players in the world, a club she has belonged to so long it is starting to look like a standing reservation.
That makes her the fifth subject of Buffalo’s Finest, the Chronicle’s column about the striking, magnetic people of Western New York, doing what they do and looking great doing it. And few people from this region do both quite like the woman whose friends call her “JPEG.”
A season worth a victory lap
Pegula’s 2026 has been one of the steadiest years anyone on tour has put together. She is 50-13 on the season, with titles in Dubai and Charleston and runner-up finishes in Berlin, Washington and Cincinnati. She reached the U.S. Open semifinals for the second year in a row, after making the final in Flushing in 2024, and added quarterfinal runs at Wimbledon and in Rome.
She has been ranked as high as No. 3 in singles and reached No. 1 in doubles. Her current run inside the Top 10 has stretched to 222 weeks, and for 209 of them she has shared that company with fellow American Coco Gauff.
The fall asked something different of her. She withdrew from events in Singapore and Beijing because of fatigue, then lost a three-set match to Jelena Ostapenko in the second round in Wuhan on Oct. 14. She was candid about it.
“Sometimes things can happen because of the accumulation of a lot of matches, playing a lot of tennis,” Pegula said in an Oct. 11 interview with the WTA.
The same conversation showed why she keeps turning up at the end of the season. “I think competing at a WTA 1000 is always a good time to win the tournament and to try to do your best,” she said.
The tennis look, made her own
Watch Pegula walk on court and you notice the polish before the first serve: the crisp visor, the clean lines, the ponytail pulled back and ready for work. She has a clear point of view about what she wears, and she likes that her sport leaves room for one.
“I think we are one of the sports where we can be pretty individualized with what we’re wearing, whether that’s how we wear our outfits, we can do whatever we want with them to make them fit ourselves,” she told WWD.
For her, the details are not decoration. She described how “a necklace or jewelry or a watch or just how you did your hair” can steady a player in the middle of a tense match. “Whatever it is, it can ground you and kind of bring you back to yourself, which is really important,” she said.
Asked to pick a favorite outfit from her career, she went straight to the purple dress she wore in the 2024 U.S. Open final.
“I guess I gotta go with the one that I wore in the final. Not just because I made the final, but I did love that dress. It was really comfortable. Love the purple color. I just thought it was comfortable, flattering, and felt the most like me,” she told SI’s Kicks On SI in August.
Her shoes come with a personal story, too. “I love my Stan Smith shoes. He actually used to coach me a long, long time ago, and I know him very well, so I always like rocking my Stan Smiths,” she said in the same interview.
Buffalo through and through
Pegula is the daughter of Terry and Kim Pegula, the owners of the Bills and Sabres, but she has built a Buffalo footprint of her own. In 2016 she and her sister Kelly Pegula opened Healthy Scratch, the restaurant at LECOM Harborcenter downtown. Two years later she launched Ready 24, her own skincare line.
Away from the court, she married Taylor Gahagen in October 2021, and the WTA reported this fall that she spent weeks at home with him and their three dogs while she recharged for the season’s final push.
She does not take herself too seriously, either. Asked what fans should call her, she offered the nickname that has followed her around the tour. “I guess I would just say, like, JPEG? That’s kind of my nickname,” she said.
One more stop in the desert
Pegula reached the final of the WTA Finals in 2023 and the semifinals last year. She heads to Indian Wells as one of the most consistent players of her generation, with a rested body and a hometown that will be watching from across the country.
Whatever she wears out on Stadium 2, expect it to be clean, comfortable and unmistakably hers. As she put it when describing what she likes on court, “It’s the tennis look.”
Buffalo would add one more thing. It is the Buffalo look, too.
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