Driving Miss Stacey : Tennis: Jellen of Calabasas cruises toward the top of junior competition after receiving a push from her parents.

Bob and Louise Jellen of Calabasas are happy to announce that their daughter Stacey, one of the best junior tennis players in the country, has reached an important milestone. She’s old enough to drive.

“Teen Auto class starts next week,” Louise says, a measure of relief in her voice as she envisions the day when Stacey chauffeurs herself to lessons, practices and tournaments.

Bob and Louise have been more than casually involved in their daughter’s career, making it their life since Stacey, who just turned 15, started batting tennis balls off their garage door nearly 10 years ago.

“It’s been a family effort,” Louise says.

The effort has paid off. Thanks to both her own doggedness and her parents’ backing, Stacey is in the fast lane of junior tennis. When she was 11, she and her doubles partner, Jennifer Capriati--the current Wunderkind on the women’s pro circuit--were runners-up in their age group in the national junior tournament. Stacey was ranked second in doubles and seventh in singles in the 14s age group.

Stacey’s parents provided more than just moral and logistic support. They also had the financial wherewithal to send her to an endless succession of tennis clinics and camps, including the country’s leading camp for juniors, the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Fla.

“Players go there from all over the world,” says Bob, the president of an insurance company. But the camp is primarily known for producing such outstanding pros as Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, Aaron Krickstein and Carling Bassett-Seguso.

While her parents dealt with the daily complications of having a tennis tot on the premises--all those newspapers articles to clip, trophies to dust, airline reservations to make--Stacey was feeling a few pangs herself. At 8, she went to one of Bollettieri’s camps in Wisconsin but left early because she was homesick.

But by the time she was a teen, Stacey was enough of a camp veteran to feel comfortable leaving home for extended periods. For five months last year, she resided at Bollettieri’s 23-acre, 45-court complex in Bradenton. “It was a big decision for her to go,” Bob says, “but you have to do those extra things to get ahead today.”

Stacey spent the last half of eighth grade living in a Bradenton condominium with seven other girls, which wasn’t the teenie-bopper heaven you’d imagine. The girls got up at 6:30 a.m. and attended a small (20 students in the entire eighth grade) private school. Then they joined an additional 150 youths and played tennis all afternoon. Study hall went from 7:30 to 9:30 at night, and before you could say David Letterman, it was lights out at 10:30.

“The camp was completely monitored,” Bob says, casting a fatherly glance at his 5-foot-8 blond daughter. “They don’t let the kids wander outside alone. No smoking, no drugs. We selected the place because they supervise very well.”

Bob, Louise and Stacey--her brother Scott, 17, was not around--were inside their spacious ranch house discussing her Bradenton experience. Stacey remembered that she was able to cope with the separation from family and friends because she was able to see them occasionally. But facts tend to get a little fuzzy when the last decade seems like one long tennis match.

“Did we go down there?” asks Louise, a petite woman who was raised on Long Island.

“I came back once, you went down there once,” Stacey says.

“No, twice,” says Bob, who grew up in L.A.

“I didn’t come home twice,” Stacey says.

“You came back to play in a South Bay tournament,” Louise points out.

“Maybe you didn’t actually stay here in this house, but you still came home ,” Bob says.

At this juncture, most kids would have called their father a Poindexter and left, but Stacey just grinned. “OK, technically, I was here twice,” she concedes.

Louise mentions that the family reached out and touched one another when Stacey was at camp. “We spoke every day,” she says.

Stacey did a double take. “No we didn’t,” she says, slightly offended that her mother would suggest such immature behavior on her part.

Louise was undaunted. “I’ve got the credit-card bills.”

The Jellens went into the family room to show a visitor a videotape on their big-screen TV. They had to walk around a massive treadmill--Stacey needed one to work out, and somehow, Louise says with disbelief, “It wound up right in the middle of the family room.”

The video, a promo for Bollettieri’s camp, was some five years old. It showed tanned kids taking lessons, doing aerobics, lifting weights and learning scientific skills to improve visual acuity. There was a young, short-haired Andre Agassi banging a top-spin forehand and a tiny cotton-topped Stacey Jellen whacking a two-handed backhand.

“My tennis really improved because of Nick’s camps,” Stacey says, “because I had a lot of really good competition. I still would have improved if I wouldn’t have gone, but I wouldn’t be as developed.”

Popping onto the TV screen was a man who had the best tan in camp. It was Bollettieri enthusiastically pitching the benefits of his academy, then adding, “And remember, fun is the name of the game.” Stacey was asked about Bollettieri, who has a reputation for driving his students. Fingering her “Stacey” necklace, she pondered the question for a few moments before saying, “He’s really . . . “ Then she paused, trying to find the right word.

“Demanding,” Louise says for her.

“A good motivator,” Stacey says. “Kind of intense. And demanding.”

“He stops you immediately if you do something wrong,” Louise adds.

Bob and Louise were willing to pay the $1,500 to $2,000 a month to continue sending Stacey to Bollettieri’s camp last year, but she didn’t want to stay in Bradenton beyond the five months, as many kids do.

“At the end, I wanted to be home,” she says. Aside from friends and family, high school beckoned. She was looking forward to her freshman year at Calabasas High.

But unlike most freshmen, Stacey wasn’t invisible. Playing on the Calabasas varsity last fall, she posted a 51-3 singles record, overwhelming older opponents with a go-for-the-jugular style.

In the Southern Section 3-A Division girls’ championships, she and teammate Natasha Pospich won the varsity doubles title and led Calabasas to a second-place team finish.

This summer, aside from Teen Auto, Stacey will be taking the usual assortment of tennis lessons--Bollettieri has a camp at Cal State Northridge--and playing in the girls’ 16s at the U.S. National Juniors in San Diego.

She also will be entering the qualifying rounds of a couple of small pro tournaments.

“It’s been my dream for as long as I can remember to be a pro some day,” Stacey says.

Burnout--a problem with some young athletes--isn’t affecting Stacey. “If I didn’t enjoy tennis, I wouldn’t be playing,” she says. Her father agrees. “I don’t believe in burnout in tennis,” Bob says.

“Maybe kids stop playing because they get frustrated over not doing well and they no longer have fun.”

Even though Stacey is a teen-age tennis phenom, Bob says he and Louise “believe in making sure she has a well-rounded life.”

Like a lot of girls her age, he says, “She has a boyfriend and she dates.”

Stacey corrected him. “I don’t date,” she says.

“Oh, right,” Bob says. “She has a boyfriend.”