Wimbledon Ball Boys and Girls: Selection and Training

Watch the back of the court between points and you will see something that took five months to learn. A fourteen-year-old stands against the backdrop with a ball in each hand, weight even, eyes on the play, and does not move at all. Not a shift of the feet, not a glance at the crowd, not a reaction when the ball comes back off the frame at head height. The whole discipline of the job is contained in that stillness, and it is far harder than the rolling and the catching that people notice.

The All England Club calls them BBGs — Ball Boys and Girls — and treats the programme as a piece of the Championships rather than as casual labour. The selection runs for the better part of a year, the training is genuinely demanding, and the failure rate along the way is high. What follows is how the whole thing works, from a nomination in a school corridor to a place on Centre Court.

Where the programme came from

Ball boys have been part of the Championships since the 1920s, and the earliest arrangement was a charitable one: the club is recorded as having taken boys from the Shaftesbury Children's Home, an institution that housed and trained boys from difficult circumstances. That origin is not a footnote. It set the tone for a programme that has always been more about discipline and opportunity than about tennis ability.

The move to schools came in the late 1960s, when the club began drawing candidates from secondary schools near the grounds instead. That change did two things. It widened the pool enormously, and it created the local relationship that still defines the programme — Wimbledon's BBGs come from the streets around Wimbledon, and that is a deliberate feature rather than an accident of geography.

Girls were admitted in 1977, a century after the first Championships. They were not seen on Centre Court until 1985, which is a gap worth sitting with: eight years of ball girls working the outside courts before the club put one on its principal stage. Mixed teams are now entirely unremarkable, and the composition of a court's six is decided on merit within the squad rather than by any quota.

The programme's institutional home is the club itself rather than any external body, and it is run by a full-time manager with a team of assistants drawn from the participating schools. The wider structure of the club that runs it, and the distinction between the club and the Championships as separate entities, is set out in our guide to the All England Lawn Tennis Club.

The schools, and how a pupil is nominated

There is no application form on the club's website and no route in as an individual. A pupil becomes a candidate because their school nominates them.

The club maintains a list of participating secondary schools, historically concentrated in the boroughs immediately around the grounds and widened over the years to take in a broader area of south west London and beyond. Each school has a named member of staff who runs the process internally, and it is that teacher who decides which pupils go forward. Selection at the school stage is not usually a tennis matter. Teachers are asked for pupils who are fit, punctual, biddable and capable of concentrating for long periods, and a school that sends unsuitable candidates two years running finds its allocation quietly reduced.

This is the single most important thing for a family to understand, and it is the source of most of the disappointment. If your child's school does not take part, there is no back door. Writing to the club does not produce a trial, and neither does a county tennis ranking. The gate is the school, and the school's gate is the teacher who runs it.

Why the club keeps it local

Two reasons, both practical. Training runs from February to June and involves regular sessions, so candidates have to be able to travel to them without missing school or spending hours on a bus. And during the fortnight itself, BBGs work long days and need to get home, which is far easier from Merton or Wandsworth than from the far side of London.

The consequence is a programme that functions as something close to a local institution. In some participating schools, being nominated is a recognised achievement with its own standing among pupils, and older siblings who have done it coach younger ones through the trials. The relationship between school sport and this kind of pathway is a theme across English tennis, and our guide to school tennis in England covers how it works more generally.

What it asks of a family

The commitment is larger than most families anticipate at the point of nomination, and it is worth setting out before anyone says yes.

From February onwards there are regular training sessions, and attendance is not optional; missing them is one of the most common reasons a candidate does not make the final squad. Then comes the fortnight itself, which falls at the end of the summer term, so the school has to agree to the absence and the pupil has to catch up whatever they miss. Participating schools plan for this, but a pupil who is already behind will struggle.

Against that, the club carries most of the practical load. Supervision during the Championships is close, the working environment is controlled, and safeguarding arrangements are what you would expect of an organisation running a scheme for several hundred children in public view. The demand on a family is time and reliability rather than money or equipment, and the pupils who fall away tend to be the ones who could not consistently get to a Saturday morning in March.

Age, fitness and the requirements candidates must meet

Candidates come from school years 9 and 10, which puts them at roughly fourteen to fifteen during the selection year. The band is narrow and it is chosen carefully.

Younger pupils generally lack the concentration span and the physical robustness for a full day on court in July heat. Older pupils are running into GCSE examinations, and no school will release a pupil in year 11 for five months of training and a fortnight of work in the middle of the summer examination and results period. Year 9 and year 10 is the window where a pupil is developed enough and unencumbered enough at the same time.

Beyond age, the requirements are about capability rather than measurements. A candidate needs enough hand speed to catch a ball hit hard and unexpectedly, enough acceleration to cross a court and get back before the next point, and enough general fitness to repeat that for hours. Vision matters, because a BBG tracks a ball travelling at speeds a spectator cannot follow. And there is a quieter requirement that is harder to test for and that decides more selections than anything else: the temperament to remain invisible.

You do not have to be good at tennis

This surprises people, and it is worth stating plainly. Playing ability is not a selection criterion. Some BBGs are county-standard juniors and many have never held a racket seriously, and the trials do not ask anyone to hit a ball over a net.

What is required is a specific and unusual combination: fast hands, a still body, and the sort of attention that does not wander when nothing is happening. Those are not tennis skills, and the pupils who have them are as likely to come from a school orchestra or a cadet force as from a tennis club. A number of participating schools have worked out that their best candidates are often not their obvious sporting ones.

The one thing a candidate does need from tennis is knowledge, and that can be learned. Anyone considering a nomination should spend the autumn watching matches with the scoring in mind rather than the shots — when the ends change, when the balls change, when a player wants a towel, how long the pause between first and second serves runs. A candidate who arrives at the winter trials already fluent in the shape of a match starts a long way ahead.

• 6BBGs on a court
• 2Positioned at the net
• 4Positioned at the back

The standing composition of a single court team at the Championships, not a total for the fortnight.

The trials, and what candidates are actually tested on

Nominated pupils attend trials over the winter, and the trials are structured rather than casual. Four things are assessed.

Ball handling. Candidates catch, roll and feed under supervision, at increasing speed. The test is not whether they can do it once but whether they can do it consistently while tired and being watched.

Movement and fitness. Acceleration over short distances, changes of direction, and the capacity to keep doing both. Nothing exotic, but the volume is higher than most fourteen-year-olds expect.

Knowledge. There is a written element covering the scoring system, the sequence of a match, when ends change, when the balls change, and the etiquette of the court. A BBG who does not know that ends change on odd-numbered games will be in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Our guide to Wimbledon's scoring rules covers the same ground a candidate has to learn.

Discipline. Assessors watch what candidates do when they are not being tested — whether they fidget in a line, whether they talk, whether they are still paying attention twenty minutes after the interesting part finished. This is the hardest criterion to prepare for and the one that eliminates the most people.

The trials are a filter, not the selection. Those who come through them enter training, and training is where the real cull happens.

Months of training before the Championships

Formal training begins in February and runs weekly through spring, on courts made available for the purpose. The squad shrinks continuously across those months.

1. 1AutumnParticipating schools nominate pupils and the club confirms numbers for the year.
2. 2WinterTrials assess ball handling, movement, knowledge of the rules and general discipline.
3. 3FebruaryFormal training begins, weekly, with candidates well in excess of the final requirement.
4. 4SpringSessions add court positioning, rotation drills and the sequence around ball changes; the squad is progressively cut.
5. 5Late springAssessment moves onto grass and into simulated match conditions with real players.
6. 6Final weeksThe squad is confirmed, court allocations are drafted and the team works the pre-Championships events.
7. 7The fortnightRotation across courts under daily review, with the strongest performers moved towards the show courts.

The standing shape of the programme. Exact dates and session counts vary from year to year.

The content of those sessions is more varied than the job appears to require. Candidates learn the two on-court positions and the movement patterns for each. They learn the ball-change sequence, which is a genuine piece of choreography: under the standard rules the first change of balls comes after the opening seven games and every nine games thereafter, and the team has to clear the old balls, distribute the new ones and get back into position without the players waiting. They learn the etiquette around towels, drinks and equipment. And they do a great deal of fitness work, because the physical demand of the fortnight is much higher than a single session suggests.

Assessment is continuous. Trainers hold records on every candidate, and the cut is made on accumulated performance rather than on a final trial. Candidates who are dropped are told, and a proportion of those dropped in one year are nominated again the next.

The two positions, and what each one does

A court team is six: two at the net and four at the back. The two roles are quite different jobs.

	Centres	Bases
Where	Kneeling at the net posts, either side	Standing at the four corners, against the backdrop
Main duty	Retrieving balls that stop in the net area or the front of the court	Holding balls, feeding the server, collecting balls that reach the back
Movement	Short bursts across the front of the court between points	Rolling along the baseline and crossing behind the court between points
Hardest part	Kneeling motionless for long periods, very close to play	Feeding the server correctly, under pressure, every single point

Centres kneel at the net posts and stay there through every point. They are the closest people to the play other than the players themselves, they are directly in the firing line of a smashed volley, and they must not move a muscle while the ball is live. When a point ends they move fast, clear whatever is in the front of the court, and return.

Bases stand at the corners with the balls. Their central job is the feed: getting the right number of balls to the server, at the moment the server wants them, without a fumble. A server who is thrown a ball too early, too late or badly has had their rhythm interrupted, and at this level rhythm is not a small thing. The bases also roll balls to each other along the ground so that the supply is distributed correctly before the next point begins.

New BBGs generally start as bases on outside courts and work towards the centre positions and the show courts. The progression is not automatic and it is reviewed daily during the fortnight.

Rolling, feeding and standing still

Three techniques define the job, and each of them is taught against an instinct.

Rolling. Balls are rolled flat and fast along the surface, never bounced and never thrown. The instinct is to throw, because a throw is faster and easier to aim. A roll is used because a bouncing ball is unpredictable on grass, because a rolled ball cannot hit anyone, and because a ball rolling along the ground does not distract a player who is setting up between points. A good roll travels the length of the baseline, arrives at the receiving BBG's feet at a catchable speed, and does not wobble.

Feeding. Two or three balls are held, and the server is offered them in a way that lets them choose without breaking stride. The BBG holds them up clearly, at a height the player can reach, and does not move once the offer is made. Players are particular about ball selection, some to the point of ritual, and a feed that arrives at the wrong height or the wrong moment produces an unhappy look that is visible to fifteen thousand people.

Standing still. The hardest of the three. A BBG at the back of the court holds position through every point, in full view of the crowd and the cameras, however hot it is and however long the rally lasts. Movement behind a baseline is a distraction to a returning player and, under the rules, a genuine hindrance. Training spends a surprising amount of time simply on holding still, and it is the skill that most often separates a BBG who works Centre Court from one who does not.

1. 1Before the serveBases hold the balls, one holds up the offer to the server, the rest stand motionless.
2. 2During the rallyNobody moves. Centres kneel at the posts, bases hold position against the backdrop.
3. 3Point endsCentres cross to clear anything in the front court, bases collect what has reached the back.
4. 4RedistributionBalls are rolled along the baseline so the supply sits with the BBGs nearest the next server.
5. 5ReadyEveryone returns to position and stops moving before the server begins their routine.

The standard cycle taught in training, described in sequence rather than measured in seconds.

How BBGs are assigned to courts and rotated

Assignment is a daily management task rather than a fixed rota. The BBG team is broken into court teams, each team is allocated to a court, and the teams rotate on and off through the day, working shifts of roughly an hour before being replaced.

That rotation exists for a practical reason. Concentration of the kind the job requires cannot be sustained for a full afternoon, and a tired BBG makes mistakes at exactly the moment a match is getting tight. Rotating in fresh teams keeps the standard even across the day, and it also means that a far larger number of young people get court time than would otherwise be possible.

Court allocation is meritocratic and it moves. The strongest teams work their way towards the show courts as the fortnight progresses, and the finals are worked by the BBGs who have performed best across the previous twelve days. Being on court for a Wimbledon final is the summit of the programme, and the people on it know exactly why they are there.

The daily rhythm also has to absorb everything the weather does to the schedule. A suspension leaves a court team standing by with nothing to do, and a resumption three hours later may need a different team entirely; how those interruptions are managed is covered in our guide to Wimbledon rain delays.

A working day during the fortnight

The day starts well before the tennis. BBGs arrive in the morning, change into the day's kit, and are briefed on allocations and anything the supervisors want addressed from the previous day. There is a holding area away from the public where teams wait between shifts, eat, and are kept out of sight.

Play on the outside courts begins late in the morning and the show courts follow, and the last match on a roofed court can run towards the curfew, so a BBG on a late allocation may be at the grounds for a very long day. Meals and drinks are provided, hydration is monitored closely in hot weather, and supervisors watch for fatigue as carefully as they watch for technique — a team member who is flagging is pulled out, because a tired fourteen-year-old on a hot court is a welfare question before it is a performance one.

The one thing the schedule cannot promise is which court anyone will be on. Allocations are drafted the previous evening and revised in the morning, and a team expecting an outside court can find itself moved. Nobody is told in advance that they are working a final.

Uniform, kit and the rules on court

BBGs wear the Championships' official on-court outfit, which has been designed by Ralph Lauren since the firm took on the club's officiating and BBG kit in 2006. The uniform changes in detail from year to year and is a small object of interest in its own right; participants keep theirs.

The rules of conduct are short and absolute. Do not speak to the players unless spoken to. Do not react to anything, including a shot you have just watched from three metres away that will be replayed all evening. Do not look at the crowd. Do not move while the ball is in play. Do not touch a ball that is still live. Hold your position through the changeover unless you have a task.

There is one further rule that is not written down anywhere and that everyone involved understands: a BBG never becomes part of the story. The measure of a well-worked match is that nobody watching it can afterwards describe a single thing any of the six did. That expectation of self-effacement runs right through the Championships, on the court and in the stands alike, and our guide to Wimbledon crowd etiquette covers the spectator half of it.

What happens when it goes wrong

It goes wrong regularly, because the job is hard and the people doing it are fourteen.

A dropped feed, a mistimed cross of the court, a ball rolled into the path of a player preparing to serve — these happen, and the handling is proportionate. The chair umpire has the authority under the rules of tennis to call a let where a genuine hindrance has interfered with a point, and if a BBG's error affects play that is the remedy: the point is replayed and the match moves on. There is no penalty against the player and no sanction against the BBG.

What follows off court is quiet. A BBG who has had a difficult spell is rotated out at the next opportunity, spoken to by a supervisor, and put back on. The programme's whole philosophy is that mistakes are a training matter rather than a disciplinary one, which is the correct approach for a scheme built on schoolchildren doing a job under considerable pressure in front of a global broadcast audience.

The removal of line judges in favour of electronic line calling has had a side effect here worth noting. The BBGs are now the only people on court besides the players and the umpire, which makes them more visible than they were and gives them slightly more to do around the court, though it changes none of their formal duties; the wider consequences of that change are covered in our guide to electronic line calling.

Pay, perks and what participants take away

BBGs are paid for the fortnight. The club sets the rate, it is a modest sum by any measure, and nobody who has been through the programme describes it as the point.

The tangible benefits beyond the payment are the uniform and kit, which participants keep, meals and refreshments during working days, and a certificate. The intangible ones are larger. Five months of structured training in concentration, punctuality and physical discipline is a serious thing to give a fourteen-year-old, and teachers at participating schools consistently report that pupils come back from it changed. A reference that says a pupil worked as a Wimbledon BBG carries weight for years, precisely because everyone understands what the selection involved.

There is also the simple matter of having been there. A BBG on Centre Court in the second week has watched the best players in the world from a few feet away, for hours, with nothing to do but pay attention. Very few people ever see the sport from that position, and a proportion of those who do stay in tennis afterwards, as players, coaches or officials. The pathways available to a teenager who wants to go further in the sport are set out in our guide to the Wimbledon Junior Championships.

How Wimbledon compares with the other majors

All four Grand Slam events use ball kids, and each runs the programme differently.

Event	Who does it	How they are selected
Wimbledon	School pupils in years 9 and 10	Nominated by participating local schools, then trials and months of training
Roland-Garros	Children of secondary school age	Regional trials across France feeding a national selection
Australian Open	School-age participants	A national programme with regional selection across the country
US Open	Adults as well as juniors, no upper age limit	Open tryouts, with many returning year after year

The US Open is the outlier and the comparison that reveals most. Because it has no upper age limit and holds open tryouts, its ball crew includes adults who have done the job for decades, and it operates far more like a paid seasonal role than a schools scheme. The technique is different too — the American courts are hard, so balls can be bounced rather than rolled, and the movement is quicker and less formal.

Roland-Garros and the Australian Open both recruit nationally, which gives them a much larger pool than Wimbledon's local one and makes their selection processes more competitive in raw numbers. Wimbledon's programme is the smallest in geographic reach and the most tied to a particular place, and the club has been consistent over decades that this is a feature it wants rather than a limitation it tolerates.

What distinguishes the Wimbledon version is the length of the training and the particular emphasis on stillness that grass and a quiet crowd demand. A ball kid at Flushing Meadows works in noise; a BBG on Centre Court works in a silence where a shifted foot is audible. The rest of the British game, and where a young player or official might go after a fortnight of it, is covered across our tennis section.