Struggling for an Identity Among the Court Royalty : Tennis: Jeffrey, an Australian from Mississippi State who lives in Woodland Hills, works for a berth in the Volvo tournament.

Mark Jeffrey is the best tennis player in the Valley.

Well, maybe not. But he may be the best Australian tennis player in the Valley.

And without any doubt, Jeffrey is the best Australian tennis player in the Valley who went to Mississippi State University.

OK. OK. He is the only Australian tennis player to attend Mississippi State in anyone’s memory.

The bottom line is, no one really knows just how good Jeffrey is. Even he says he doesn’t know.

But he might get a good indication today when he squares off in the first of what he hopes will be three weekend qualifying matches for a berth in the Volvo tennis tournament at UCLA, a major pro event that starts Monday and features defending champion Stefan Edberg, along with Michael Chang and Pete Sampras.

Jeffrey, a Woodland Hills resident, was a top junior player during his high school career in Sydney and became a standout player at Mississippi State, earning All-American honors as a freshman and making the All-Southeast Conference team four consecutive years. He was consistently ranked in the top 25 among U.S. college players during his stay in Starkville, Miss., and rose as high as 10th on that list.

He has also played in the prestigious Australian Open, although he was just 19 and was bumped from the tournament in the first round.

But since the beginning of this year, Jeffrey, 24, has been honing his skills against some of the best players in Southern California while serving as an instructor at the Warner Center Club in Woodland Hills. And now, he thinks his journey to the world of the pro tennis tour has begun.

He already has defeated four opponents to advance from a field of more than 200 players to a field of 32 in the Volvo qualifying. Only four will gain entry into the main draw of the tournament.

“I’m not sure I’ll be one of them,” Jeffrey said. “I didn’t have many problems in the first four matches. One of them went all three sets. But now, these are the best guys. I’m confident I can beat them, but really, who knows? I don’t know what to expect.”

Bet on one thing. Whatever happens, it won’t be a shock to Jeffrey, who has already been part of radical change.

Sydney, Australia, to Starkville, Miss., for example.

He had left high school and Australia and was testing the tennis grounds of the United States when he began getting offers from interested collegiate coaches, including discussions with coaches at Louisiana State and Texas. But he settled on Mississippi State because, he said, it seemed to have the best tennis program.

In four years, Jeffrey also earned a degree in economics. But he had a head start on that. In the 18 months after he left Australia, he made a fleeting attempt to play pro tennis.

That was a lesson in economics.

“I was losing so much money I had to quit,” Jeffrey said. “I had a sponsor in Australia and my parents helped me an awful lot, but it was just far too expensive. Traveling and living in hotels seven days a week. I flew from Sydney to London to play in one tournament and then right back to the States for another. That was about $2,600 in air fare alone. It got to be way too much.”

He did, in that brief fling, make it into the ATP computer rankings as the 280th best player in the world. And while he might have been 280th in the world, he was ranked, he indicated, in the top 100 on the list of people without money.

So a four-year scholarship at a big American university sounded like quite a deal.

“But I sure didn’t know much about Mississippi,” he said. “What a place. It was all farmland and country, and everything closed at midnight. Sydney is like a small L.A., a busy place with four million people. Starkville, well, it wasn’t like that at all.

“It was like being in the middle of nowhere. It was quite a change for me, frustrating at times.”

Among the things he missed most, he said, was the beach. As a kid in Sydney, few days went by without Jeffrey and his friends taking to the swells of the South Pacific.

“I noticed right away that Mississippi didn’t have a lot of beaches,” Jeffrey said. “They do have some very nice swamps, though.”

And some nice women, he said. He plans to marry one of them, a Mississippi State graduate also, in the next year or so. He met his fiancee, well, . . .

“She was the best friend of my girlfriend,” Jeffrey said, smiling. “That was a pretty funny story.”

A story, alas, that he will not tell.

Last October, he was invited to the Warner Center Club for the West Coast Intercollegiate tennis championships. He was seeded No. 7, but won the prestigious event.

He said he liked the Woodland Hills area, and loved the idea that it was just 20 minutes from the beach. So he asked Paul Holbach, the Warner Center Club’s tennis director, about possibly securing a job as an instructor after he graduated.

Five months later, Holbach hired the eager Jeffrey. And while lessons consume much of his time, he has found plenty of extra time to work on his game against some top-level players.

“Just being here has helped my game so much,” he said. “In Australia, the competition was nothing like this. There just weren’t enough people, not enough good players. But here, there are so many really good players.

“I think I have the potential to break onto the pro circuit rather quickly. I really do. I think in 18 months I will have survived all the rounds of qualifying for tournaments and will be ranked high enough to start getting into some events without qualifying. Eighteen months. That’s my goal.”

He hopes to attain his other goal--getting married--even sooner than that. And settling down in a real home. Likely, he said, in Woodland Hills. Very unlikely, in Starkville, Miss.

“I could never live in Mississippi,” he said. “Some very nice people, but of all the places I might live one day, that is not one of them.”