After practice, Barty has to film a short promotional video for Tennis Australia. She stands inside the air-conditioned National Tennis Centre, staring down a lens and smiling. “Hey, ball kids, you do an amazing job! We love what you do! We … arrgghh that’s not right!” she says, slapping her hands together. “Faaaaarrrr out! I never need two takes.” On the fourth try she nails her line, then fist-bumps the cameraman. Afterwards, we walk across Olympic Boulevard to grab coffee at the Glasshouse Cafe, attached to the Collingwood Football Club. Barty is an avid AFL fan, specifically for the Richmond Tigers. During a tournament in Wuhan, China, in September, she seriously considered flying to Melbourne and back between matches, in order to watch the Tigers in the AFL grand final. (They won, in case you hadn’t noticed.) Her manager, Nikki Craig, who also works with ex-AFL players including Simon Black, and surfer Stephanie Gilmore, says Barty takes a footy overseas at all times. “They kick it around on court beforehand. It’s part of her warm-up. The crowds love it.”

“The first ball I threw to her, bang!” says Barty’s junior coach Jim Joyce.

Barty grew up far from the AFL heartland, though, in Springfield, a suburb of Ipswich, west of Brisbane. Her father, Robert, works in government, and her mother, Josie, is a radiographer. Robert says Ashleigh didn’t want to play netball like her two older sisters Sara, 26, and Ali, 24 – “didn’t want to play what she thought was a girls’ game” – so she tried tennis. She wasn’t yet five when she met junior tennis coach Jim Joyce. Joyce doesn’t like kids starting that young. He sends them away until they are seven or eight. “But the first ball I threw to her, bang!” Joyce says. “She hit it right back.” Barty’s hand-eye coordination was exceptional, he says, yet her focus was what truly stood out. “The whole time I was talking to the other kids, twice her age, she was just staring at me. She never took her eyes off me once.” Advertisement At home she found an old wooden racquet in the shed, and stood in front of the exterior brick wall of the living room. “I used to hit the ball against that wall every day after school, for hours on end,” she says, sipping a glass of water and grinning. “It used to do Mum and Dad’s heads in.” Joyce quickly recognised her gifts but also the shortcoming of Barty being, well, short (166 centimetres, or five foot five). And so he fashioned a game built on variety, including the serve and volley, the single slice backhand and the kick-serve. Then he would challenge her with new and unpredictable shot combinations. “You force a chip-slice backhand, then a quick switch to a volley – forcing her to practise her transition – and she would nail it,” he says. “You can try those things with all girls, but they can’t all do it.” He also taught unorthodox lessons in winning and losing. In a carnival when she was six, little Ash was winning too easily, so Joyce “rigged” the final by pitting her against a much older player, just to see her beaten. “But she came off that court smiling her head off. It was a little test, and I learnt that she could take it straight away.”

Barty wins the grade 5 Queensland state school finals.





With her parents’ blessing, Joyce also held Barty back from the tournament circuit, avoiding the siren song of points and rankings. At nine, he instead had her practising against 15-year-old boys. When she was 12 she was playing against male adults. At one tournament in Brisbane, Joyce gave an opponent explicit clues on how to beat Barty. And when she won a tournament in Rockhampton, then carried the trophy in to tennis training, Joyce put it in the bin. “I was only mucking around. But I said, ‘That’s how important that trophy will be when you go on to other things.’ Because deep down I knew this was a kid that had all the chances of going far.” And she did. Barty won so many cups, in fact, that she and Joyce began to recycle them, ripping off the engraved plates, then donating the trophies to battling local tennis groups.

Coach Jim Joyce took on Barty when she was four.

Around the same time, Barty and her sisters learnt about their Indigenous background, which derives from their great-grandmother, a member of the Ngaragu people from southern NSW and north-eastern Victoria. The three girls began the process of registering with the clan, and learning what they could. The language itself is nearly extinct, but a dictionary of key words exists, which could be used to describe her game. Her forehand is like malub, lightning. Her smash is like miribi, thunder; her backhand slice like djuran, running water. And she glides lightly on the court like a mugan, a ghost. Barty has just been named Sportswoman of the Year in the National Dreamtime Awards. “My heritage is really important to me,” she says, putting her flat white down for a moment. “I’ve always had that olive complexion and the squished nose, and I just think it’s important to do the best I can to be a good role model.” People have, after all, been watching her since childhood.

Barty attracted attention even during matches at suburban tennis clubs.

Former world number eight Alicia Molik first saw Barty when she was 10, when a friend told Molik to get down to the Glen Iris Valley Tennis Club immediately to see this girl playing in the under-12 nationals. “I’ll never forget it. I just thought, ‘Wow!’ ” says Molik. As Fed Cup captain, she notices the same natural flair in Barty today. “Every time I watch her – in every match and every practice session – Ash is able to come up with something incredible.” By 14, she was being picked for international tours. The first was to Europe, and she was miserable. Homesick, she called her parents most nights in tears.

Barty remembers one match in Holland, reigning supreme on court yet sobbing throughout the entire contest.

“It was terrible. It was all just too much. I was younger than the other girls on tour, so I knew them but not well. I just felt lonely and strange.” Whenever someone told her she should just come home, she resisted and stayed, compelled by her own good form. One year, her father saw his teenage daughter for only 27 days. “That was horrible for us, because we’re a really close family,” he says. “People think what she is doing is glamorous, but it’s really tough. All she does is sit on a plane, sleep in a hotel and play tennis.”

Barty with Jason Stoltenberg after winning the under-12 girls singles at the Australian Championships; and with Evonne Goolagong Cawley after her Wimbledon win in 2011.

Jason Stoltenberg, who played professional tennis for 14 years and was once ranked 19 in the world, was brought on board to help Barty when she was 15, joining her in England a few weeks before the 2011 Wimbledon Juniors. She somehow won its singles title. “The win doesn’t guarantee anything,” says Stoltenberg, who also coached Lleyton Hewitt, “but it tells you this girl is quite unique, and has the ability to do things that you don’t often expect.” Barty remembers feeling comfortable – even joyful – walking through the gates of the famed All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club to play. But the attention lavished on her victory was too great. After the final she got off court, showered and headed directly to the airport to fly home, breaking with convention by skipping the Wimbledon Champions’ Ball. “It was just too much – it was too much beyond tennis, beyond playing the game,” she says. Joyce caught up with her when she returned, and could see the draining effect of exposure. “The media went berserk. I was inundated. I remember thinking if Ash doesn’t have a break, we’re going to lose her.”

Barty won the 2011 Wimbledon Juniors but recoiled from the media glare. Photo: AP

Instead, she threw herself into training, even moving to Melbourne. Barty was 16 and living alone in an apartment in South Yarra, doing her own laundry and cooking, using a recipe book written by her mother with all her favourite foods – even instructions on how to make a chicken wrap. Within a year she knew she could not go on. She sat down with Stoltenberg during a training session: “I was in tears, in his arms, and just said I couldn’t do it anymore.” He was not at all surprised, always suspecting Barty felt trapped by her own outstanding performance: “I thought there were potential alarm bells the whole time.” She received nothing but support for her choice from family, friends and coaches. Mentor and Australian tennis legend Evonne Goolagong Cawley, a former world number one who won 14 grand slams, sent her a text message: “Hey darl. Good decision. Go and wet a line.” And so she did. She went fishing. She travelled to northern NSW for a few weeks at the beach and the pub. She had a new home built, only five minutes’ drive from her parents and her sisters. “I was so relieved,” Barty says, sighing. “It was a weird time, but as soon as I got it off my chest I was so much better.”