Maria Catalano

Maria Catalano (born 27 February 1982 ) is an English snooker player from Dudley. Since 1998, she has competed on the women's snooker tour, where she has won 11 ranking titles, including the 2007 British Women's Open and the 2012 UK Women's Championship. A five-time runner-up at the World Women's Snooker Championship, she was ranked world number one on the women's tour during the 2013–14 season.

In 2018, she won the World Women's Pairs Championship with Reanne Evans. In 2022, she became the first female player to compete in the final stages of the World Seniors Championship. She is a first cousin of seven-time world snooker champion Ronnie O'Sullivan.

Career
Catalano attended secondary school at Hillcrest Community College, Netherton, West Midlands. She began playing snooker in working men's clubs when she was 15 and received coaching from her cousin, professional player Ronnie O'Sullivan. She made her World Women's Snooker Tour debut in 1998. She has since won 11 women's ranking titles, including the Connie Gough Trophy six times, the 2007 British Women's Open, and the 2012 UK Women's Championship. In 2003, she ended Kelly Fisher's almost two-year, 69-match winning streak by defeating her 3–1 in the quarter-finals of the East Anglian Open. In 2011, she ended Reanne Evans's record 90-match winning streak with a 3–1 victory in the semi-finals of the Northern Championship; Reanne Evans had been undefeated on the women's tour since 2008.

She is a five-time runner-up in the World Women's Snooker Championship, having lost the 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2013 finals to Reanne Evans and the 2018 final to Ng On-yee. At the 2012 event, she made her highest break on the women's tour, a 116 in her semi-final match against Tatjana Vasiljeva. She was ranked world number one on the women's tour during the 2013–14 season. In 2014, after six-time world champion Steve Davis suggested that women lacked the "single-minded, obsessional type of brain" needed to succeed at the elite levels of the sport, Catalano agreed, saying, "I don't think women will ever compete with men at the top level [of snooker]. I believe that male and female species are wired mentally different... a man is more single-minded, so has a stronger concentration on one thing at a time."

She and Reanne Evans won the World Women's Pairs Championship in 2018, defeating Laura Evans and Suzie Opacic 3–0 in the final. She and Vasiljeva had previously been runners-up in the pairs event in 2016. Her form declined after 2018, which she attributed to her father's death in that year, commenting in 2022 that "it’s been a constant struggle since then" and saying she had been "finding it difficult to practice, just feeling I was getting nothing out of it." However, in May 2022, she became the first woman to compete in the final stages of the World Seniors Championship at the Crucible Theatre. She lost 0–3 to Wael Talaat but made a half-century break in the final frame.

In August 2022, after transgender snooker player Jamie Hunter won the inaugural US Women’s Open, Catalano objected to transgender players competing in women's events. Claiming that "if this is allowed and becomes more common, there is no future for women’s snooker," she threatened to stop playing unless transgender players were excluded from women's tournaments. However, Jason Ferguson, chairman of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, responded that the governing body would not institute such a ban. Ferguson stated: "We have taken sufficient medical advice to be very satisfied that our policy is right for the current climate."

Personal life
Her father, Antonio Catalano, was the brother of Ronnie O'Sullivan's mother, Maria O'Sullivan (née Catalano), making the two players first cousins. She was named Maria after Ronnie O'Sullivan's mother, while Ronnie O'Sullivan was given the middle name Antonio after her father. Following her father's death from cancer in 2018, she shaved her head on the eve of the 2018 UK Women's Championship to raise funds for the Macmillan Cancer Support charity. Outside snooker, she works in her family's ice-cream business.

Performance timeline
World Women's Snooker