Oh boy! Now they’re called ‘ ball kids’

PC brigade invade Centre Court as young helpers are renamed

FOR decades, they have been as much a part of Wimbledon as Pimm’s, strawberries and queuing.

But it seems ball boys are on the brink of extinction – at l east as far as the commentators are concerned.

In a sign that political correctness has reached the courts of Wimbledon, the traditional ‘ball boys’ and ‘ball girls’ are being replaced with the rather more modern ‘ball kids’.

Sue Barker twice used the description on BBC1 yesterday as she reported on the Duchess of Cornwall meeting ‘ball kids’ during her visit to the tournament. And despite the All England Club insisting it had no plans to stop using the term ball boys, its official Wimbledon website also described how Camilla had greeted a ‘row of ball kids’.

It follows repeated use of the ‘ball kids’ expression during BBC 5 Live’s coverage of the recent French Open.

Commentators are said to find it less cumbersome than saying ‘ball boys and ball girls’, and snappier than ‘ball children’. Tennis sponsors are also helping the drive to eradicate the traditional ball boy by increasingly using the new phrase.

Barclays runs an X Factor-style ‘ball kids’ competition to select youngsters aged 12 to 16 to collect balls at the ATP World Tour Finals.

Entitled The Barclays Ball Kids Programme, it uses regional and national trials to whittle down around 2,500 applicants to just 30, who are then trained to help on the court.

The phrase is already well used overseas too – including by the man who created the first modern ball boy training programme at the French Open in the Seventies.

Ridha Bensalha told the New York Times in a recent interview: ‘ I’m hard. The ball kids like this. You know, they do it because I must be hard with them.’

But Wimbledon spectators are less keen on the change, and yesterday expressed disappointment at the decline of the traditional expression.

Martha Stephens, 54, who was attending her third Championships, said: ‘It just sounds like they are trying to make tennis cool. Wimbledon doesn’t need to be cool, it has decades of tradition.’

Ball boys were first used at Wimbledon i n 1920, and were originally provided by Shaftesbury Homes for deprived children.

Ball girls were introduced to the Championships i n 1977 and they f i rst appeared on Centre Court eight years later.

Both the boys and the girls received a modern makeover in 2006 when their uniforms were changed from shirt and shorts in Wimbledon purple and dark green club colours to a Polo Ralph Lauren design in blue.

Ball girls also swapped skirts for shorts in 2001.

There are 250 ball boys and girls working at this year’s Championships, made up of volunteers from local schools who got through a rigorous selection process.

A BBC spokesman said: ‘The use of “ball kids” is occasionally used in tennis commentary but less so than “ball girl” and “ball boy”.

‘There is no official BBC policy on this and it is often dependent on how much time a commentator has to describe a situation rather than an intentional or required use of either.’

A Wimbledon spokesman was adamant that it had no plans to stop using the phrases ‘ball boys’ and ‘ball girls’.