Venus, Tiafoe, Keys: Charlotte Invitational tennis event is coming back
Game, set and Venus — the Charlotte Invitational is returning for another year.
The inaugural one-night exhibition tennis event was a success, drawing 16,194 fans to Spectrum Center in December 2024. For its second year, the Charlotte Invitational will return with two of the same four players from that event in Frances Tiafoe and Madison Keys.
They will be joined by current world No. 4 men’s player Taylor Fritz and 45-year-old Venus Williams, the legendary Grand Slam champion who is returning to play in Charlotte 19 years after she faced off against her younger sister Serena in a 2006 Charlotte exhibition.
This year’s event was announced Monday. It will be held on Thursday, Dec. 4, again in the Spectrum Center (and two days before the ACC football championship at Bank of America Stadium). Tickets for the exhibition doubleheader aren’t yet available, but you can sign up for information about the pre-sale at CLTInvitational.com.
“Last year validated that Charlotte is a tennis city, and we’re thrilled to build on that momentum with the return of this unparalleled event,” said Will Pitts, the CEO of Charlotte Sports Foundation.
What the 2025 event will have is four American players who are well-known in tennis circles. What it won’t have that the 2024 one boasted is Carlos Alcaraz, the electrifying Spaniard who is by almost any measure the most popular male player in the game.
Tiafoe wore a Charlotte Hornets jersey while edging Alcaraz in the exhibition in 2024, then joked that “16,000 people came to watch me. Nobody cares about Carlos.” He knew otherwise, of course; Alcaraz was the event’s biggest headliner. But Tiafoe remains a popular top-15 player, Fritz is firmly in the top 10 and they have been part of an American men’s tennis resurgence that has placed four players in the current top 15 (Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul are the two others).
Keys defeated Sloane Stephens in 2024 in the first Charlotte Invitational. Less than two months later, Keys won her first Grand Slam singles title, edging Aryna Sabalenka in three sets, and is now ranked No. 6 in the world.
Unlike her younger sister Serena, Venus Williams hasn’t officially retired from tennis. But it’s rare to see her play in front of a crowd any longer. She won seven Grand Slam singles titles during her career (five of them at Wimbledon) and was ranked No. 1 in both singles and doubles at various times in her career. She hasn’t been regularly ranked in the top 100 of the women’s tour since 2021 and has yet to play an official tournament in 2025. However, Williams remains a fan favorite and an undeniable draw.
This story was originally published June 23, 2025 at 11:00 AM.
