With the ITF not yet showing any tournaments for next year on their calendar yet, I went looking. As some of our girls like to camp out in Australia for 3 months and Gabi has a lot of points to defend from there, I was particularly interested in Australia. There's nothing on Tennis Australia's searchable web calendar yet, but their pdf does list their 2019 schedule. Assuming it is complete and correct, if any of our girls were looking to spend their winter there, they may need a rethink as there is now a month between tournaments.
One of the Perth tournaments is now a 15K and the other has been dropped but it was announced last week that there would be a 15K in Port Pirie in that week meaning there is no WTA ranking tournament between Launceston in week 5 and Mildura in week 10. The other changes from last year are that Launceston is back to a 60K and Canberra 1 down to a 25K.
Events for WTA ranking Week 1 Playford 25K Hard Week 4 Burnie 60K Hard Week 5 Launceston 60K Hard Week 10 Mildura 25K Grass Week 12 Canberra 25K Clay Week 13 Canberra 25K Clay
Events for ITF ranking Week 7 Port Pirie 15K Hard Week 8 Perth 15K Hard These are the first women's 15Ks Australia have held since 2015, which may give hope to some 15Ks in the UK next year.
I can see Gabi and possibly some of our other girls in AO qualifying sticking around after to play the 60Ks but I can't see the 25k series being 2/3rds on clay being of interest to any of our girls.
Agreed, that looks a very short schedule our players would be interested in next year. To go back for the 25ks there would have to be something else on in the region too.
It will be interesting to see how schedules are affected more broadly with these tour changes next year.