Public Parks: The Birthplace of Champions.

The 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, captured a timeless snapshot of tennis in the United States. That snapshot is not Venus Williams with a beaming smile as she holds the U.S. flag and takes a victory lap around the court. Nor is it the sisters Williams, Venus and Serena, jumping into each others arms in jubilation over becoming the first sisters to share Olympic gold in women's doubles.

The tennis image that endures from the 2000 Olympics, quite simply, is the U.S. women's team: Lindsay Davenport, Monica Seles, Serena Williams, Venus Williams, coach Billie Jean King and assistant coach Zina Garrison. They represent roughly three generations of the world's best women's tennis players.

Even more important here, they are tennis champions who emerged from public courts and parks.

King grew up playing at Houghton Park in Long Beach, Calif. Garrison grew up playing in Houston's MacGregor Park.

The Williams sisters emerged from the "East Compton Hills Country Club," the name their father Richard playfully gave to the public courts in rough and tumble Compton, Calif.

Seles, before immigrating to the United States, learned to play tennis and became a European junior champion by hitting balls against the brick wall of her family's apartment building in the former Yugoslavia and by hitting on the makeshift tennis court her father engineered by stringing up a net between parked cars.

Davenport is the only member of the 2000 U.S. Olympic women's tennis team who is not a product of public courts; however, she played United States Tennis Association (USTA) Junior Team Tennis, which lives on in parks throughout the country as USA Team Tennis (Youth).

Tennis is once again a thriving sport. People throughout the country are flocking to the courts -- almost 9.5 million of them to public courts. Thirty years ago, the A.C. Nielsen company reported approximately 10 million tennis players in the country.

At that time, King was proving herself as the world's No. 1 women's tennis player. Arthur Ashe had burst from Brook Field Park in Richmond, Va., to become the first black man to win a Grand Slam tournament. Chris Evert was just coming on the scene as a teen-age superstar out of Holiday Park in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Easily three of the biggest names in tennis history. All of them products of public parks. The question, however, is whether today's public parks can produce the champions of tomorrow.

"In this country, only a small percentage of the top players do go to academies," says Doug MacCurdy, former director of USA Tennis Player Development.

But, says Nick Bollettieri, arguably the father of the American tennis academy system, "We can't go back 40 years and 30 years and 20 years. The times have changed. Look at America today. Jesus! We're lucky to have a park survive!"

For about 20 years, tennis academies such as the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy (NBTA) -- not public parks -- have been perceived as the prime producers of champion tennis players. This perception has been fueled by the media, as well as by the results of notable players. In successive years, Jimmy Arias and Carling Bassett emerged from the NBTA to reach the US Open semifinals as teenagers.

Then Bollettieri snared the big one: Andre Agassi, easily the most recognizable figure in U.S. tennis today.

Now, tennis academies abound throughout the country. Part of their appeal for players pursuing dreams of tennis stardom is the higher concentration of top-quality players than might be found anywhere else. Shadisha Robinson, one of the nation's top-ranked juniors, left her family in South Ozone Park, Queens, New York, for that very reason, opting to attend the Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, Fla., rather than continue in New York City's Baisley Park.

"You can't become a professional player in New York," Robinson, 16, told the New York Daily News last summer. "You have to be in Florida. There are better players, better competition, better weather."

The competition is the primary thing today's public parks might be missing from yesteryear. Quite often there is not a concentration of really good players at public courts who can push and challenge one another. The irony is that concentration probably was lost in the tennis boom that saw participation zoom from about 10 million people in 1970 to 34 million in 1974.

"If you go back to when tennis boomed in the 1970s, you had most tennis played in parks and recreation," says Larry Haugness, tennis director at the El Paso (Texas) Youth Tennis Center and a member of the USTA Tennis Innovation Committee. "There were no clubs. Parks and recreation was everywhere. Everywhere you went, there were tennis courts.

Well, people got together and said, `Hey, we like tennis. Let's get a group of people; we'll start a club so we can play amongst ourselves.' So all those people started clubs, and those clubs pulled those top recreation teachers and made them pros. All of a sudden, now we've got teaching pros.

"What happened to the recreation department? It lost the expertise. It's actually gone further and further away from that. Until now."

In April, at the USTA Super National Spring Championships/Easter Bowl, one of the preeminent junior events in the country, Luke Shields of Grand Junction, Colo., was runner-up in the boys' 16-and-under division. His brother, Clancy, was a semifinalist in the boys' 14-and-unders. Both grew up playing on public courts.

Throughout the country, there are public parks programs that do an excellent job developing youngsters who might someday be champions: New York Junior Tennis League in New York City; the Washington Tennis & Education Foundation at William H.G. Fitzgerald Tennis Center in Washington, D.C.; Burdette Tennis Center in Atlanta, Ga.; the George E. Barnes Family Junior Tennis Center in San Diego, Calif., etc.

"I have a special affinity for (public parks tennis)," says Greg Patton, a USA Tennis Player Development national coach who is the product of a public park program in Santa Barbara, Calif. "I don't want people to think that all of a sudden the public park system has faded into the sunset. It's going to be the sunrise of the sport."

The success of the Williams sisters, who learned the game from their father on a public court, serves as a model of what could be for thousands of aspiring champions worldwide. They received academy coaching later in their development, first from Rick Macci Tennis Academy and then from Bollettieri's. But even Bollettieri concedes the foundation of the Williams sisters' games was established by their father.

In many cases, the champions of today who are perceived as having come from academies indeed developed their games elsewhere, often on public courts or in public parks.

Says Bollettieri, who taught his first "ace" pupil, ironically, on the public courts of Victory Park in North Miami Beach, Fla., "To look at the talent, to look at the raw talent and watch kids compete, finding out certain parts of the puzzle, you need the city recreation department."

Even more importantly, Patton says, there needs to be an "angel of tennis."

"The most important thing is a person who cares. That's it!" Patton says. "If the person cares about the kids and loves them and has a passion for the kids, then everything else will fall into place.... They don't even have to have that much knowledge about the game -- just be a pied piper that brings kids in."

Conrad Ramos, director of the Phoenix (Ariz.) Tennis Center, is one such angel of tennis. He attracts about 50-60 youngsters a week to his program, many with their parents. The kids love playing so much that he has to turn off the lights on the courts at 9:45 p.m. -- well after classes have ended -- just to get them to go home.

Ramos would love to develop a world-class player and even has a prospect in 10-year-old Pricilla Annoual, who was No. 18 in the USTA/Southwest Section 14-and under rankings in mid-July. But the primary focus for Ramos is ensuring the kids have fun. He has had T-shirts made that have a saying across the back: "It's about a park and having fun." Because he is at a city park operating as an independent contractor, Ramos doesn't have the resources to do all that he would like to do. His frustration about that is clear. But still, he charges forward.

"You just develop a spirit," Ramos says, "and pretty soon, you have a Pricilla."

... a champion of tomorrow.