His eye on the ball Ready to serve: Darren Sturgess tucks in at the media restaurant at the Rod Laver Arena. I actually don't get to see many matches. Photo: Ken Irwin When the helpful people at Tennis Australia suggest I have lunch with Australian Open court-services manager Darren Sturgess at about 5pm, I assume they've misunderstood my request. No, no, I was asking to talk to him over the midday meal, the break that divides the morning from the afternoon. Lunch. They must have heard of it. How about 4.30? comes the reply. We agree on 1.30pm, which seems a bit late, but Sturgess is probably busy. After all, it's the first day of the qualifiers, and Sturgess, among other things, looks after the ball kids squad, so there's bound to be a bit for him to do. I wander through the labyrinth under the Rod Laver Arena, the corridors which lead around a hidden city of locker rooms and media rooms, cafes, restaurants and bathrooms, where there is no natural light. Everybody is wearing bar-coded lanyards, which determine where they can eat - with the players, the staff or the press - and are preloaded with a daily allowance to pay for their meals. Most people are in a restrained hurry, as if there's a secret walking race to get from one side of the arena to the other, but the participants might be disqualified if they swing their arms or break into a sweat. And there are staff everywhere in this subterranean city, because tennis, which used to be a game run by volunteers, is now a business, with marketing managers and human resources people, a social media team and IT technicians, regulations, protocols, levels of access and accreditation. And the more people it involves, the more there is to do and the harder they all work. I wait for Sturgess in the media restaurant, a big, clean, plain room, where the diners wear their lanyards like bibs. When Sturgess arrives, he apologises immediately for calls he might have to take while we eat. He's an amiable, smiling chap in prominent spectacles. He looks like a grown-up ball kid, a natural enthusiast, a young Ben Elton. His phone quickly buzzes. There's a Federer charity match on tonight, everything has to be ready by 4pm, and there are some questions from the court. Sturgess took over as court-services manager in 2009, and was given responsibility for the ball kids in 2010. He has to set up the courts, make sure all the equipment and sponsors' ephemera is in place, and oversee 380 ball kids, all aged 12 to 15. The 341 Victorian ball kids were selected through trials held at local tennis clubs. The 13 interstate squad members, including two from NSW, were chosen on their performance at Australian Open Series events. The remainder of the squad is made up of youths from China and Korea. Ninety-eight of the 380 are female, and a surprising number are related: there are eight sets of siblings, one pair of twins and a nest of triplets. The ball kids go through a training program, including six on-court sessions, where they practice ball-handling, rolling and the all-important marching on and off court. They are supposed to be invisible, but something about them appeals to tennis fans, who remember when they were young, and the magical feeling that a child could be part of such an important event, that a schoolie could handle the same ball as the greatest tennis players in the world, and a 12-year-old could get on TV. Unfortunately, that magic also makes the ball kids highly visible. Everyone is watching them, out of the corner of their eyes, and there's a whole genre of videos on YouTube featuring ball kids' errors, forced and unforced. Sturgess watches all of them, and uses them in training sessions and briefings, as he tries to ensure his squad don't make the same mistakes. There's the one where the ball kid collapsed at Wimbledon in 2011, during a first-round match between Vera Zvonareva and Alison Riske. "Briefing the kids to look after themselves is probably the biggest challenge," Sturgess says. On the day they arrive with their parents to collect their uniforms and accreditation, the kids are told how important it is to have breakfast or lunch before they go out on the court, and to drink plenty of water. Melbourne's volatile January climate can present problems. If the temperature rises too steeply, the ball kids' on-court time is adjusted from an hour to 45 minutes. Another call: the Australian Open is expanding its statistics service, and the staff are trying to find a place for the new statisticians to sit where they won't block wheelchair access to the courts. There are many YouTube videos of ball kids being hit by balls - more than once by Novak Djokovic, for some reason, but a more popular clip with the ball kids themselves is the Incredible Ball Boy Catch at the Open in 2012, when Roger Federer played Rafael Nadel in the semis. Federer served a fault, the return came back and Federer flicked it to the ball kid, who caught it with a nonchalant panache that suggested he spent his mornings plucking doves from the sky. "I think that [video] had a million hits during the AO that year," Sturgess says. Ball kids have to be alert to the habits of the players. "The kids are trained to pick up on those and share them with the staff and the other ball kids," Sturgess says. Richard Gasquet, if he wins the point, wants that same ball to serve with the next point. You often see him looking, waiting for it to come down. Overseas, I've seen Caroline Wozniacki only want to take the ball from the side she's serving from, and alternating back and forward like that. Nadal and Murray tend to look for the towel after most points, so the ball kids are trained to be alert and ready to go. Nadal arranges his drink bottles so the brand names face the court. "One year, early on, when we weren't aware of it," says Sturgess, carefully, "they might've been picked up. But it was quickly worked out that we didn't do that again. Sturgess and I both choose the same meal for lunch, "lamb leg two ways braised and grilled with green olive granolata eggplant and heirloom tomatoes." The poetry of the menu promises a more exotic experience than the dish on the plate, which turns out to be a couple of slices of meat served with chips. Payment has to be made by lanyard, and there's no money on mine. Sturgess says Todd Woodbridge once found he couldn't afford to buy lunch at the players' restaurant - an elaborate, expensive establishment with a live pasta station and a sushi bar - because there was a ball kid also called Todd Woodbridge, and Todd Woodbridge the ball kid's pass was loaded with Todd Woodbridge the player's allowance, and vice versa. Sturgess doesn't get to each much of his lamb, because his phone buzzes with a question about arranging passes for the contractors who have to swap over the court furniture for the Federer match. I glance at the screen of the phone and notice Sturgess has 113 unread emails. Then the handset vibrates again. Sturgess was born in Bankstown, NSW, but lives with his girlfriend Shanan in Melbourne's northern suburbs. Their first child, Ethan, is four and a half months old. "I reckon if anyone wants to prepare for parenthood," Sturgess says, "working in events is a very good way of doing it. When I was getting up all night because he wasn't sleeping through, exhausted as I was, it didn't feel different to the tennis. Sturgess grew up watching Wimbledon each year on television with his grandmother. "Stefan Edberg was one of my favourites," he says. I used to get all his outfits and gear, and copy him. And Pat Cash, obviously. I used to like David Wheaton as well, for some reason. Sturgess played junior representative football for Canterbury when he was "six to 10 years old." He doesn't remember much about it, except that "it hurt," but he gave up tennis at about 12 to go back to cricket and rugby league because he missed being part of team. He would have liked to be a ball kid, but he missed the three-year window. But why do ball kids have to be kids? Why can't they be ball adults? "Ball kids rolls off the tongue a bit easier," Sturgess says. In the US Open, they have ball people, with no ceiling on age. "We could be ball kids there," he says. There's still hope for us. But, he confesses, "I'm not sure I'd do it now. I feel like I've outgrown it. Besides, "I think the enjoyment they get out of it is probably more than what adults would, and it works in well with their school holidays." It's also a smart route into the business. "Probably about a third of the team looking after the ball kids - about 10 or 12 of them - used to be ball kids themselves," he says. A lot of the court-services team were ball kids. A lot of the shades attendants are past ball kids as well. Sturgess says there are so many siblings in the squad because if a sister or brother makes the grade then word quickly passes through the family about what the selectors want, and how to impress them. I ask about the triplets. "I don't know which ones they are," he says. But aren't they identical? "What can you call 'identical' when there's 380 of them, all in the same uniform?" he asks. They all look like triplets. Sturgess is remarkably good humoured, considering the pressure he is under. When I ask which was the most memorable match he's seen, he admits: "I actually don't get to see many matches. And when it's on the TV, I'm not looking at the match. I'm looking at the ball kids, and I'm looking at all the equipment, to make sure it's in the right location and nothing's blocking the sponsors' properties.