Having a ball of a time

The Winston-Salem Open Tennis Tournament marked popular tennis player Andy Murray’s comeback post-surgery, and although he lost, what’s interesting is that K. Venkata Srikar, a 11th Grade Indo-American student studying at Alamance-Burlington Early College, was one of the ball boys at the match.

Srikar’s parents — Srinivas and Subbulaksh-mi, who are originally from Visakhapatnam, are settled in North Carolina, and the youngster has been playing tennis since his school days.

The 15-year-old is currently playing USTA sanctioned Junior Tourna-ments within North Carolina, and is also the No.1 player for his High School Tennis Team.

“I applied for the ball boy position and after going through my credentials and experience, they called me for a three-day session during which the officials gave lessons to all the ball kids on how to behave on court and demonstrated their activities,” says Srikar.

Apparently, the tournament officials divided all the ball boys into different groups, with each group consisting of seven kids, and each court having six ball boys.

Not only was Srikar a ball boy for Murray’s match, he also played the part at Rohan Bopanna’s doubles match. “I got a chance to interact with top-notch ATP players, which will surely help me in tuning my own game,” concludes Srikar.