Poised to Pounce

By Eleanor Preston

Donald Young has a thing or two to learn about how to celebrate Grand Slam titles, even junior ones. An hour after becoming the youngest-ever junior Grand Slam winner and the youngest-ever junior World No. 1 by winning the boys’ Australian Open title, the 15-year-old from Chicago sounded like every other disgruntled kid on a trip with mom and dad.

“I don’t know really because my parents are talking about going to the casino, but I can’t go in,” Young said. “So there’s no point. I don’t know, I’ll just sit outside, I guess. Maybe I’ll go to a movie.”

Judging by the way Young played to beat Korean Sun-Yong Kim in Mel-bourne, he should get plenty of practice at how to mark success as he continues his career. He is regarded by many inside the United States Tennis Association and around the world as one of the most promising youngsters currently on the junior circuit. Despite being a whippersnapper even by junior standards, Young’s success in Melbourne means that he must now accept the burden once carried by the then teenaged Andy Roddick as the next bright hope for American tennis. Roddick won the Australian and US Open junior titles in 2000, a feat Young would love to emulate.

“I think that’s most people’s goal when they win the first one but I’ll just see how it goes,” Young said. “I’m not going to try to put the extra pressure on myself. When it comes to expectations I just try to keep playing and winning and playing good. If that pressure comes with it, it comes with it. I just try not to focus on it.”

The good news for Young is that he is not alone in carrying that burden. Seventeen-year-old Timothy Neilly beat Young to win the Orange Bowl title last December and, thus, etched his name on the list of ones to watch. Certainly Neilly’s victory is a match that Young won’t forget in a hurry.

“I was really upset after that match,” Young said, clearly still smarting from the loss. “I was expecting to win because I beat him before. He came out a different person and started playing a lot better than he had ever played before. I was surprised and he got me. It helped me a lot, though, because now I’m not taking anybody for granted. I might say they’re a scrub or something. But I’m not really serious about it.”

Young is coached in Atlanta by his parents Donald Snr and Illonah, who are keen to ensure that their son doesn’t get carried away by his early success. While both his talent and his profile should ensure plenty of tournament wildcards thrust in his direction, he is penciled in to play his tennis largely on the junior circuit for the rest of this season in order to ensure that he gets experience of match play with players near his own age.

Much of Young’s success this year and beyond will depend on how quickly he grows and how much stronger he gets. Both his serve and his ground strokes lack the power that comes with stockiness but all those involved in Young’s career have little choice but to let nature take its course. The promising thing is just how well he has coped thus far with bigger, stronger opponents by using his natural ball-striking ability, movement and guile.

“I feel like I’m capable of playing with the players,” he said. “They’re still all bigger pretty much than me but I feel like I can play with them and I’ve gotten a bit more respect from them. I feel like I’m up there with the rest of them.”

Neilly agrees that the junior circuit provides the perfect environment to hone match skills and make mistakes on a circuit where the consequences of defeat aren’t as serious as they are on the grown-up circuit.

“My main goal is to play a lot of matches and get better and you can really only do that by playing tournaments, that’s why junior tennis is so important,” said Neilly.

“This is my last year in juniors and I’d really like to do well and hopefully make the top five by the end of the year but it’s all about development for me.”

Sadly the USTA’s cupboard is a little more bare when it comes to junior girls capable of challenging the flood of female players coming from Eastern Europe. Belarus’s Viktoria Azarenka took the girls’ title in Australia and, with it, the World No. 1 ranking. She, along with the likes of Russia’s Alisa Kleybanova, New Zea-land’s Croatian-born hope Marina Erakovic and Canada’s Aleksandra Wozniak are all likely to be dominating the junior rankings ahead of the U.S. girls’ contingent.

All of which puts even more of a spotlight on Young. Fortunately the young man from Chicago is not the sort to let weight of expectation stop him from achieving all that he has set his heart on. “When I watch guys like Roddick play I know that, obviously, there’s a big gap because they’re out there getting to Slam finals but when I get bigger and older, hopefully I can be up there in a couple years,” he said, firmly. “I’m going to try at least.”

Until he finds a way in to the tennis elite, at least we’ll know where to find Young—he’ll be the one waiting patiently outside.