A Young Athlete’s Life Cut Short : Accident: The 11-year-old Lynwood girl was killed while traveling with her teammates to Las Vegas to play the game she loved--basketball.

Scrappy and tough, Tracey Myricks launched her sports career at age 8 by winning a spot on a previously all-boys Pop Warner football team.

She moved on to basketball, tagging along to practice with her older sisters and dribbling so incessantly that she drove her family nuts. This year, she finally turned 11--old enough to shoot and run with the big kids on the Lynwood Lady Knights.

Tracey was traveling with the team to a Las Vegas tournament over the weekend when an assistant coach fell asleep at the wheel of the Lady Knights’ van. It flipped, bounced three times and landed 650 feet from where it left the roadway.

Tracey was critically hurt and died a few hours later.

Nine of her teammates, Coach Ellis Barfield and Assistant Coach Michelle Allen were injured in the accident early Saturday morning. On Sunday, two young players remained in intensive care at University Medical Center in Las Vegas.

Khaleah Smith, 12, was fighting for her life after suffering massive head injuries and a severed arm. Naishun Jenkin, 14, was listed in serious condition. Three other Lady Knights were stable.

And back home in Lynwood, friends and relatives mourned.

They described Tracey as a loving, outgoing girl, a hard-working student who earned nearly straight A’s in the fifth grade at Mark Twain Elementary School.

“She got along with everybody,” said her mother, Lisa. “She was like a nucleus--everyone went with her. She had a big heart.”

Above all, friends said, Tracey was determined. When she got a home computer, she plunged into a teach-yourself-to-type program--swiftly working up to 85 words per minute. When she wanted to try football, she joined the Pop Warner team, and quickly won over the bewildered boys.

But her real passion was basketball. She would spend hours on the court after school, and at night would plunk down in front of the TV to study her Lakers heroes.

She was thrilled to accompany the Lady Knights on the trip to games in Arizona, a basketball seminar in Colorado and the tournament at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, according to her aunt, Rose Heisser.

“Tracey got into sports three years ago, and she just became a fanatic, especially with this basketball,” Heisser said. “She would practice as many hours as her parents would allow. She didn’t travel a lot, so this trip was real exciting for her.”

Tracey’s parents traveled to Nevada on Saturday to bring back their daughter’s body, and returned home Sunday.

People in Lynwood talk approvingly about the Lady Knights, a city-sponsored after-school team.

“Sports is their way out, even for girls,” said Ladonna Gissel, a member of the board of directors at the First Baptist Church of Lynwood.

Tracey’s older sister, 16-year-old Christina, plays on the Lady Knights. She was in a different van Saturday morning when the accident occurred.

Tracey’s mother works as a supervisor at a photography lab, and her father, John Andrew, is employed by Los Angeles County.

A spokesman for the Nevada Highway Patrol, Trooper Steve Harney, said the district attorney’s office will decide in about 10 days whether to charge the van’s driver with involuntary manslaughter. The driver, Assistant Coach Allen, has told officers that she nodded off at the wheel.

Officers found the driver’s side crushed, the windows shattered and the tires blown. But the interior emerged in relatively good condition, they said.

“I hate to say it, but there was room to live in there,” Harney said. If the girls had been wearing their seat belts, he said, “we would have had a better outcome.”