ASH Barty’s brow furrows and her soft, dark eyes squint with a mixture of annoyance and frustration.

She’s 15 years old and although she has played tennis around the world, against all comers, on all surfaces she faces a problem unlike any she has ever encountered.

As she sits down with The Courier-Mail for the first major interview of her life, she admits she’s flummoxed.

“Quadratic equations,” she explains to me, lifting her head from her exercise book and momentarily putting away her homework.

“It’s Grade 10 maths. Pretty complicated.”

On this August morning in 2011 Brisbane turns on an ideal winter’s day for tennis; cool but with the sun shining on the 10 green acrylic hardcourts just off Shaw Road in the leafy northern suburb of Wooloowin where Ash is playing a local tournament following her extraordinary and unexpected victory in the Wimbledon juniors a month earlier.

She took that historic victory at the world’s most revered tennis stadium in her stride as a portent of even greater things to come, but her composure has been rattled back home by her schoolwork.

The best young players in Australia had lined up to have a crack at Wimbledon’s first Australian female champion in more than 30 years and Ash is 40 minutes away from playing Sara Tomic, 13-year-old sister of the troubled and troublesome Bernard.

Eight years ago, though, on Shaw Rd, the Tomics were the last thing on Ash’s mind.

Instead of warming up with a practice partner ahead of her match, the 163cm schoolgirl had been hunched over a small table beside the courts for most of the morning, studying a textbook that explained the complexities of second-order polynomial equations.

“School is very important to me,” she told me back then, “but I’m not there often so I have to keep up my studies as best I can.”

STARTING TO MAKE THE GRADES

At 13, Ash had been dux of her class in Grade 8 at Woodcrest College in the outer western Brisbane suburb of Springfield, but at 15 her schooling was already sporadic as she competed in one tennis tournament after another; just about a different country every week.

She told me that in the previous 12 months she had spent 33 weeks playing tennis in England, France, Belgium, Germany, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, South Korea, the United States and Mexico.

“People tell me that I seem a lot older than 15,” she said. “I think travelling so much has made me more mature and a little more independent.”

She didn’t let jetlag or the pressures of international tennis affect her education, though, taking every opportunity she could between matches to win trophies in the classroom as well as on the courts.

Alfio Balsamo, the dean of Woodcrest, was the head of sport there in 2011, and said this week that Ash had been an inspiration to the other students throughout her junior tennis days, getting straight As and Bs, although much of her high school years were spent living out of a suitcase.

A week after his former student stunned the world by winning the French Open and rising to be the No.1 player in the world, he said the Woodcrest teachers all remembered her not just for being clever and a freakish athlete but for her humble, down to earth attitude.

“She didn’t want to be known as anything different, even when she won junior Wimbledon,’’ he said.

Back then, Ash was living in Springfield with her parents and two older sisters in a neat unpretentious house in a leafy street. Eight years later she still lives only five minutes from the family home.

She didn’t like to make a fuss about anything back then and felt uncomfortable in the spotlight. But for the 2011 Wimbledon junior final, nearly all of the 11,500 seats on Court 1 were occupied and the news that the match was being televised live to Australia had the butterflies in her stomach swarming in a mad frenzy.

No Australian female player had won a singles title at Wimbledon since 1980, when Debbie Freeman and Evonne Goolagong Cawley took the girls’ and ladies’ titles respectively. No-one expected Ash, the No.12 girls seed in 2011, to go far, least of all herself.

“It was my first trip to Wimbledon,’’ she told me. “I was really only there to gain some experience.’’

THE ACE IN THE PACK

Ash was just four years and 50 weeks old in early April of 2001 when she climbed out of her parents’ Ford and tottered into the West Brisbane Tennis Centre, a group of five courts amid a cluster of factories on Archerfield Rd at Richlands.

Almost from the moment she could walk, the little bundle of energy had been hitting a tennis ball against a wall and her parents, Robert and Josie Barty, thought she might be ready to learn the game properly on a real court with a real net.

“She was a chubby little kid with a huge smile on her face,” says her first coach Jim Joyce, a tennis mentor cut from the same suntanned, wiry, laconic cloth as all those great Australian tennis mentors from Harry Hopman, Neale Fraser and Tony Roche down.

Joyce’s initial impression was that Ash was too young to join his classes but he decided to test her out.

He tossed her a tennis ball. It flew back off her racquet like a fluorescent yellow missile.

Thinking it was a fluke, he tossed her another.

It flew past him even faster.

Joyce told Ash’s parents: “Bring her back next week’’.

He made sure, though, that the twinkling little starlet lost her first proper match so she would not think success came too easily.

“Right from the start, her focus and concentration for a little kid were just phenomenal,” Joyce recalled.

“I’d show her things and she’d pick them up straightaway.

“Her biggest attribute wasn’t just the hand-eye coordination – it was that she could listen and concentrate better than kids of 12 or 13. She was totally focused on being a great player.

“Even when she was 10 or 12, before her session, she’d turn up two hours early and be on the court.’’

Many years later Ash would say one of the reasons she started playing tennis was simply to avoid following her sisters Ali and Sara to netball.

TENNIS WORLD TAKES NOTICE

Ash started winning junior tournaments almost immediately and caught the eye of radio sports commentator Peter Psaltis, an early supporter.

After her victory at the Junior Wimbledon, Psaltis told The Courier-Mail: “I’m just so happy for Ash and her family because they’re such good people. You see a lot of flashy types in tennis but everyone around her is so down-to-earth. She just has a passion to play, and play well.

“Even when she was six or seven, Ash would stay up late watching the tennis on TV and turn up the next day trying to replicate all the shots of Roger Federer or Serena Williams.’’

Robert and Josie Barty had no idea where their daughter’s tennis talent came from because until Ash took up the game, no-one on either side of their families was remotely interested in the game.

But at 11 she was part of the Queensland Primary Schools team which won the 2007 Bruce Cup in Burnie, Tasmania, although the name “Ashleigh Barty’’ appeared last on the list of 14 team members in one of the first newspaper reports on the budding champion.

In July 2008 at Carseldine’s Club Coops she won the Queensland 12-years title and the following year received $500 from the Federal Government’s Local Sporting Champions Grants to help with the cost of a tennis trip to Perth.

At 14 she was named Tennis Australia’s Junior Athlete of the Year and was invited to Las Vegas as a guest of the Adidas player development team to receive specialist tuition from Andre Agassi’s former coach, the Australian Darren Cahill.

Ash befriended Agassi’s wife, the tennis great Steffi Graf, who passed on many tips about being a champion. Ash said at the time that the trip had given her “a lot of confidence and self-belief’’ and made her realise how she needed to work and “what sacrifices I must make in order to be a great tennis player.’’

MANAGER SNUBS JOKER FOR ASH

At 15 she was on Wimbledon’s No.1 Court playing for the junior trophy.

In the lead-up she won four matches on the grass courts in the sylvan surrounds of London’s south. One of her victims there was the 185cm Florida hotshot Madison Keys, who had a serve like a bazooka.

Almost before she knew it, Ash was walking out onto No.1 Court on the afternoon of Sunday, July 3, to face 16-year-old Russian Irina Khromacheva, the No.3 seed, in the Wimbledon final.

Ash dared to dream her name would join those of past girl champions Martina Hingis, Tracy Austin, Amelie Mauresmo and Caroline Wozniacki. All of them went on to become the No.1 women’s player in the world.

As Ash took her place on the baseline she noticed it was scuffed from the well-heeled feet of the world’s two best men’s players – Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal – who both triumphed in lead-up matches on that very same court earlier in the week.

Ash made a nervous start. Before long the Russian grunted, squealed and screamed to a 4-2 lead in the first set but, scurrying, volleying, slicing and top-spinning, Ash clawed her way back to take it 7-5.

Less than 100 metres away, 15,000 fans had congregated tightly around the most famous 260 sqm of lawn in the world, Wimbledon’s Centre Court, for the men’s final between Djokovic and Nadal.

As Djokovic limbered up his powerful shoulders with some explosive practice serves, he looked up into the stands to see just one empty seat amid the sea of anxious fans.

One of his American managers, Rick Montz had just added Ash to the books of the US firm Creative Artists Agency.

Rather than leave his seat at No.1 Court to watch Djokovic chase $1.74 million in one of the most anticipated sporting events of the year, Montz stayed right where he was, watching the girls’ final next to Ash’s new international coach Jason Stoltenberg, the Australian who guided Lleyton Hewitt to the world No 1 ranking.

The girls’ match offered no prizemoney but a world of possibilities.

“There was no way I was leaving Ash,” Montz told The Courier-Mail from New York.

“I knew I was about to see something special.”

WINNING AT WIMBLEDON

Watching the match at home in Springfield, Robert and Josie and Ash’s sisters, Sara and Ali, joined the neighbouring Codd family along with two dogs, two cats and a lorikeet, around the television.

When Ash first hit the heights, her father Robert, now 56, was the executive manager of Indigenous Services at the State Library of Queensland, and Josie, three years younger, was a radiographer at Ipswich Hospital, where Ash was born in 1996.

Sara, then 20, was a student in nursing and midwifery, and Ali, then 18, was studying to be a primary school teacher.

Robert’s a modest, unassuming bloke with glasses and salt-and-pepper hair. All three of the girls spent time researching his Aboriginal ancestry, which he can trace back to the Snowy Mountains and northern Victoria.

He and Josie were keen golfers who met at the Gailes Golf Club near Ipswich 36 years ago, though raising three girls meant they usually had little time to play.

Ash’s family didn’t see a point of the 2011 men’s final in which Djokovic beat Nadal to clinch the world No.1 ranking. They were instead transfixed by Ash’s final on another channel.

Ash kept her family and all the other spectators on the edge of the couch. She took a 4-1 lead in the second set but the Belgian-based Muscovite on the other side of the net fought back and the set was locked at 6-all. The umpire announced a tiebreaker.

Before Khromacheva knew what hit her, though, Ash was leading 6-2 and was a point away from history. Khromacheva pulled a point back with a drop shot that caught Ash on the baseline.

The desperate Russian served again, hoping to make it 6-4, but Ash kept smashing forehands into the corner and when Khromacheva popped up a short, feeble return, Ash swooped and blasted it cross-court.

“Game, set, match Miss Barty,” the umpire announced, “two sets to love, 7-5, 7-6.”

The spectators, both at No.1 Court and at Springfield, stood to applaud, but there was barely a ripple of emotion on the face of the new Wimbledon champion. When photographers asked Ash to look more animated as she kissed the trophy, a half-smile and clenched fist is all they got.

After the match she credited her coach of the time, Nicole Pratt, and a pre-match briefing from Jason Stoltenberg, as being critical to the victory.

“They’ve [Pratt and Stoltenberg] been able to share their experiences,’’ Ash said.

“On the morning of the Wimbledon final Jase gave me a bit of a pep talk. He was a semi-finalist here. He coached Lleyton Hewitt to world No.1 and to this title. To be able to share those experiences with those guys is really special.’’

Ash was invited to celebrate with Djokovic, women’s winner Petra Kvitová and South Australia’s Wimbledon boys’ champion, 17-year-old Luke Saville, at the lavish winners’ ball at London’s InterContinental Park Lane Hotel, but she had other plans.

“I’m not really a fan of dressing up and stuff,’’ she told me.

“I just wanted to share the win with my family.

“Everyone was more excited than me. I just wanted to come home. Out on the court I’m very competitive, but I don’t like to make a big fuss about anything. I was never going to give up. It’s the final of junior Wimbledon.

“I keep trying my guts out for every point. I was able to get a few good points in a row and upset her a little bit.’’

She caught the first plane home to Brisbane for a family barbecue and a fishing trip to Hervey Bay.

A couple of weeks later she was invited to visit her favourite AFL team, the struggling Richmond Tigers, in Melbourne, to tell them what it felt like to be a winner.

Ash also paid tribute to her hero, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, after becoming only the second Indigenous Australian to win a Wimbledon title.

She said she had been inspired by the former world No.1 who won seven singles majors.

Goolagong Cawley was one of the first to contact Ash after her win.

“She sent me a text message after my match saying congratulations,’’ Ash told me.

“I really like that. We’re close. I’m really pleased to be able to talk to her like that.

“She’s a nice person to talk to. She gives me good confidence, and I’m happy to be a part of her life really.’’

“REMEMBER, SHE’S ONLY 15”

BACK at the Shaw Park Tennis Centre, a month after Wimbledon, Ash was as precise and methodical as a computer as she put down her maths book and mowed down Sara Tomic in straight sets.

Over the next two days she beat three other opponents – without dropping a set – to claim the women’s singles title at the 2011 Shaw Park Australian Money Tournament. The $2000 cheque almost doubled her career prizemoney.

Five months later she made her doubles debut on the Women’s Tennis Association Tour at the Brisbane International, the first event of the year.

After losing in singles qualifying, she partnered Casey Dellacqua to make the semi-finals in doubles while still only 15.

The following week, she made her singles debut as a wildcard at the Hobart International, losing her opening round match to Bethanie Mattek-Sands, an American ranked No.56 in the world.

Already rated by some commentators as a better prospect than the great “Swiss Miss’’ Martina Hingis at the same age, Ash went down 6-2, 6-2 after holding her serve and then breaking her 26-year-old opponent to lead 2-0 before the American’s power and experience came to the fore.

Ash then made her Grand Slam main draw debut the very next week at the 2012 Australian Open in Melbourne.

At the time she said she was unsure how she would handle the occasion, but predicted: “I’ll probably go out there and play some horrendous tennis, and be nervous, but I’ll just go out and have some fun. I think I’ll probably just keep to myself in the locker-room, just keep to myself and hide from everyone!”

Already though, former Davis Cup champion John Fitzgerald was hailing her as “probably the best prospect we’ve had in 20 years in the women’s game’’.

Stoltenberg said he had not seen a more talented Australian 15-year-old.

“When you talk about talent, there’s her emotional talent and her ability to handle pressure, that’s a talent in itself,” he said.

“And she’s had a coach by the name of Jim Joyce when she was young, and he’s taught her a lot of good things and developed her love for tennis, and she’s got the support of a good family. So I think a lot of those things contribute to that talent, but we still need to manage her carefully.”

Stoltenberg was constantly thankful for the slice backhand honed by Joyce.

“I ring him up occasionally and say ‘Jeez, thanks for that slice backhand’, and she instinctively just seems to use it at the right time,” he said.

Stoltenberg said then that Ash’s first taste of the Australian Open would “do wonders’’ for her self-belief and perspective.

“But I keep saying it: she’s 15, and we can’t get too overexcited,” Stoltenberg said.

“I mean, it is exciting, but we’ve still got to try to keep it in perspective.

“We can’t control what other people think and say, but that’s a good problem to have, though, isn’t it? If people are saying nice things about her and expecting good things of her, then that means she’s been doing well, and she’s doing something positive. And she’s a pretty level-headed kid, as you can see. She just takes it in her stride, and she’ll be back fishing tomorrow when she gets home.’’

Ash lost her first round match at Melbourne to American-based Georgian, Anna Tatishvili, but chalked the match up to experience.

Stoltenberg told The Courier-Mail then that Ash was not one to get carried away by her success.

“There have been plenty of Wimbledon junior champions who fell by the wayside,” he said.

“Ash is doing well for a girl of 15 but we have to maintain perspective. She’s still a young kid and she’s barely scratching the surface of the game.’’

At 15 Ash was already wise beyond her years, though.

As she took a break from her homework beside those green courts on Shaw Rd, she told me: “Yes, I’ve won at Wimbledon but it’s still only the juniors. It’s just a stepping stone and there are still many more I have to get over in the next few years.’’

Helping her on the way was Goolagong Cawley, the legend of the game who remains a close friend.

She said last week after Ash’s rise to world No.1 that she had always been waiting for the women’s game to field a competitor who played with the drive, precision – and class ­– of Roger Federer. That’s Ash Barty.

After Ash won Junior Wimbledon, Goolagong Cawley congratulated her little mate on the win.

But more importantly 15-year-old Ash told me back then, “she congratulated me on the way I conducted myself on the court.

“I think that’s the most important thing.”

TOMORROW: Part II – Barty reaches her break point