Junior tennis player Timea Babos.

WHEN Timea Babos casually recalls her tennis experiences from around the globe, it’s easy to forget the Hungarian is just 16-years-old.

The Gosling High Performace Tennis Centre ace played in the junior event at Wimbledon, as well as the equivilent tournaments at the French and US Opens in 2009.

Earlier this year the International Tennis Federation’s number four ranked female junior in the world, was a beaten finalist in the doubles at the Junior Australian Open and made the quarter-finals of the singles.

For just over a year she has been training in Welwyn Garden City, after linking up with Gosling coach John Morris.

Of her move to Herts she said: “I met John Morris in South America in January 2009 and we were talking about my tennis and he said with my game I could be quite good on grass.

“But there is no chance for practice on grass in Hungary, so he said I should come over and practice in England.

“I ended up with them for four weeks and went to Asia and then have started to come more often.”

Babos will train at Gosling when it suits her schedule depending on which surface she needs to prepare on.

She added: “I’m going back to Hungary soon as the clay season is coming and you don’t have clay and we have, so it depends on what I need.

“My Dad is my coach, he still works with me and of course he wants to see me, how I am playing and how I am improving.”

Babos is currently recovering from an ankle injury she suffered when competing at a $25,000 event in Jersey last month.

It means she had to cancel a planned trip to South Korea and Japan to rest and focus on her rehabilitation from the injury ahead of May’s Junior French Open.

However, it will not just be junior competitions that the Hungarian will be competing in during 2010.

“As a junior I’ll be in mostly just the Grand Slams, and then start to do mainly the senior events and hopefully get better and try to play on the WTAs [Women’s Tennis Association] soon,” she added.

It looks like being an exciting, and possibly breakthrough, season for the teen.

As she looks ahead to the rest of the term, she added: “It’s another change in my life going from 14s to 16s then to ITF (International Tennis Federation) and now to the big tour, I’m happy to do that and am quite looking forward to it.”

When living in England the teen stays with a host family in Herts.

“I’m really lucky, I stay with a really nice family here, I have everything I need, I enjoy living here,” she said.

“I’m here mostly to play on hard courts and to practice with people, I can always change my partners so that why.

“It’s better than at home because there I can’t really practice with too many people as all the good Hungarians are practicing abroad, we are not at a big centre where everyone can practice together so that’s a bit bad.

“It could be good there as well, but until they do I have to practice somewhere else.”

For now Gosling are more than happy to have a figure so highly thought of in the tennis world training at their centre.

That is before she jets off on her next globetrotting trip to play in another far off land.