From hard-hitting serves to long rallies and the occasional cheeky drop-shot, there will be many reasons to have your eyes glued to the tennis courts of Montreal’s IGA Stadium starting in just a few days.
But among some of the world’s top-ranked tennis players will be the unsung heroes of the annual National Bank Open: the ball kids.
Ball kids are young athletes who will have an important job during the tournament; they will be picking up the tennis balls and giving them to the players without drawing any attention to themselves.
“It’s way more technical than people think,” said ball kid Lucas Younan. “You have to be invisible but you have to move the balls from one side of the court to the other. So it’s way harder than we think and you have to think a lot. You have to watch all around the court to see where the ball is and to see where other ball boys are and if the ball is with them.”
Those kids get to experience the surreal feeling of being on the court while history is being made.
“When there’s Canadian players, the crowd goes crazy when there’s a good point. And then we’re on the court, and we’re trying not to smile. Because it’s just like an unreal feeling,” said Sophia Craciunecu, a ball kid for the fifth time in a row.
Nicolas Beaudet, now the ball kid supervisor, himself started as a ball kid in 1997.
“You need kids passionate about tennis, they want to be close to the players, they need to be athletic. They throw the ball, that’s the only place in the world that we throw the ball, so they need to be very precise, very strong, quick, and be very focused on the court and understand what’s going on,” said Beaudet.
There will be eight groups of 12 ball kids. But by the end of the tournament, there will only be two groups going to the final singles and double matches.
This year the stadium got a new upgrade.
“We’re going to have LED screens on the centre court,” said Marc- Antoine Farly, the senior, corporate, strategic and communication manager of Tennis Canada. “We’re going to have breakpoints, second serve, first serve. We’re going to see this being animated on screen. It’s going to totally change what people see normally.”
The tournament is presented by Rogers Communications, the parent company of CityNews.
