Capriati Ready for Lesson Today From Headmistress : Women: Teen-ager faces Navratilova on Centre Court today in quarterfinals.

Today at Wimbledon will be a hard day at tennis school for 15-year-old Jennifer Capriati, who will be taking a killer quiz.

Capriati, the child prodigy from Florida who made her way into the quarterfinals of women’s singles Monday with a 3-6, 6-1, 6-1 victory over Brenda Schultz of the Netherlands, will play Martina Navratilova.

Navratilova is a nine-time Wimbledon champion and a 6-2, 6-4 winner over Capriati in their only meeting.

As Capriati’s coach, Tom Gullikson, sees it, the match will be student vs. schoolmarm.

“If Jennifer returns serve as well as she did in the last two sets today, she has a shot against Martina,” Gullikson said. “Martina won’t serve quite as hard as Brenda Schultz did today, but she will back up her serve with better volleys.

“The main thing is not the winning and losing, but the experience, what she learns. I don’t want her to lose, but I do know that you learn more from losing than you do from winning. If you are eventually going to win Grand Slam titles, you have to see these great players and play them in places like Centre Court at Wimbledon.”

Gullikson, a former journeyman player on the tour and half of the once highly competitive doubles team of twins Tom and Tim, is like a teacher advocating normal progress in his student toward graduation. The theory is that Capriati has already skipped too many grades, and the fear is that, like babies going from rolling over to walking, missing crawling can be damaging forever.

And in so many ways, Capriati is merely a baby in the world of professional tennis.

She burst on the scene in the spring of 1990, and before the summer months arrived, she was on the covers of Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. Only two other female tennis players have made Newsweek’s cover--Chris Evert and Navratilova.

Quickly, Capriati compiled a string of firsts, becoming the:

--Youngest seeded player and youngest to win a match at Wimbledon.

--Youngest Grand Slam semifinalist with her French Open showing.

--Youngest to play in the Wightman Cup.

And so on. In 1990, she beat five of the top 10 players in the world, and to the casual fan, her immediate future seemed filled with top-five rankings and Grand Slam titles.

Then Gullikson and her parents, Stefano and Denise Capriati, decided to slow things down a bit. The student was growing too fast and needed somebody to put a book on her head.

“This is her sophomore year, and things are different,” Gullikson said. “We are determined, with somebody 15 years old, to be much more game-oriented, rather than results-oriented. You can see it already. Her game is much more developed. She’s got a topspin lob now, and she comes in more and volleys better.

“The goal is for her to learn how to play, to bring her game along. It is not to get in the top four or five this year, or something like that.”

She appeared to have learned well in her match against Schultz, a 6-foot-2, 170-pounder who serves like Boris Becker and maybe could beat him in arm wrestling. A man with a radar gun stood behind Schultz and recorded service speeds of 105 and 107 m.p.h.

Schultz knocked off sixth-seeded Jana Novotna in the second round, and the way she started serving against Capriati, it appeared that Schultz might knock off the ninth-seeded player as well.

But once Capriati got onto the rockets being fired at her--and once Schultz started hitting almost as many rockets into the net as she did into the service box--Capriati was able to return crisply and turn the match around fairly easily.

Capriati has frequently called Navratilova “the Ledge,” kind of Valley-girl talk for legend. Since a first-round scare, Navratilova has breezed into the quarterfinals. Her match Monday, a 6-1, 6-3 steamrollering of Catarina Lindqvist, broke Evert’s record for most singles matches played here by a woman, 112. Truly, the record of a ledge.

Capriati’s preparation will be helped greatly by some quick work with her coach, Gullikson, who, like Navratilova, is left-handed.

“I can get her ready,” Gullikson said. “Martina is a typical, greasy left-hander, just like me. I’ll show Jen lots of that lefty stuff.”

It’s all part of Capriati’s curriculum. Today’s lecture: How to Play a Greasy Left-Handed Ledge.