Youngster Having a Ball as Ball Girl

She says this is fun.

She claims this is cool.

She swears that while the officials are shouting at her to get out of the way because a tennis ball is zooming toward her head at 130 mph, that nothing, not even a Pete Sampras smile, could be as exhilarating.

Notice Kasey Vaughn over there in the corner of the court? Probably not. She is nothing more than 5 feet of freckles, braces, toothpicks for arms and a ball cap pulled low on her head. She is 11 years old, and in the sixth grade.

And she may have one of the most dangerous jobs in sports.

She is in the line of fire every day at the 2001 Mercedes-Benz Cup at UCLA’s Los Angeles Tennis Center, a ball girl who puts herself in the middle of the action by dodging rockets off the serve, rushing to snare a bounce into the corner, turning on a dime, getting in a workout that even the smarmiest of tennis coaches would have to be proud of.

“The neatest part about it is that you get to be on the court with the pros,” she said.

During Wednesday’s competition, in a match between Taylor Dent of Newport Beach and Carlos Moya of Spain, Vaughn was only inches away from being hit by a searing, 140 mph serve.

“Ouch,” she thought to herself, diving out of the way, already having been hit once during the tournament. Only minutes before, a Dent overhead had rocketed on a bounce into the stands, hitting a woman in the face, causing the match to stop briefly.

“I know Taylor hit 144 [mph] at Wimbledon,” she said.

Enough to make you nervous when even grown men admit to being intimidated by the speed of Dent’s game.

“I had no chance with his serve,” the sixth-seeded Moya said after losing, 6-3, 6-4. “I just tried not to be hit by it.”

Vaughn wants to do much more than run around the court and pick up the balls. She plays tennis at Sierra Canyon Middle School, a love of hers since she was 7, and wants to play professionally. She was one of 60 kids picked to help at the tournament, and she loves every minute of it. She also had to practice holding up to six tennis balls at once to get the job, one of six ball girls and boys on the court at once.

The players are nice to her. One even walked over to her after a match and stuck a pair of his sunglasses on her head.

“Most of the time, people are just yelling at me to look up and get out of the way,” she said.