Early and Personal Life
Andrea Petkovic was born to Bosnian Serb parents in Tuzla, SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SFR Yugoslavia. but at the age of six months, the family relocated to Germany. Petkovic first took to the tennis courts when she was six; her father Zoran Petković, former Yugoslav tennis player and member of the Yugoslavia Davis Cup team, was a coach at a club in Darmstadt at the time. He introduced her to the sport and later became her coach. She was able to finish high school before competing in tennis full-time because Zoran never influenced her into joining the professional circuit.
Apart from tennis, she likes to educate herself by reading; her favourite authors are Goethe and Wilde. Her mother Amira is a dental assistant while her younger sister Anja is a student. Petkovic graduated from high school in 2006 with an Abitur from the Georg-Büchner-Schule in Darmstadt, a Gymnasium. She has been studying Political science at the FernUniversität Hagen since 2008.
Petkovic also has a successful YouTube channel which is home to her video blog entitled "Petkorazzi". In the blog she makes fun of herself, gives fans chances to win prizes, and shows fans what life is like on the tour. She does the blog in both German and English.
Since the beginning of her professional career, she keeps a diary at irregular intervals about her life on the WTA Tour in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a major German newspaper. Petkovic obtained German citizenship in 2001. She speaks Serbian, German, English and French. Petkovic is of Serb ancestry and was born in present day Bosnia and Herzegovina (then part of SFR Yugoslavia), in a 2009 interview with the WTA she stated how her parents might move to Novi Sad, Serbia, where they have a second home. When asked how German she feels Petkovic replied that "Obviously I'm German, but I always say my soul is still Serbian. Germans are generally more cool, reserved. I'm very emotional, have lots of fire in my personality. In that sense still feel very close to my heritage. For all that, there is much to appreciate about Germany. I feel like I am part of the 'system' and feel very rooted there."
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