【WhenSallyRidewastenyearsold，shehadnoideathatshewouldsomedaygrowuptobeoneofAmerica'sfirstwomenastronauts．Infact，ifyouhadaskedherthenwhatshewantedtobe，shewouldhavesaid，"Iwanttoplayshortstop（游】

　　When Sally Ride was ten years old，she had no idea that she would someday grow up to be one of America's first women astronauts．In fact，if you had asked her then what she wanted to be，she would have said，"I want to play shortstop （游击手） for the Los Angeles Dodgers．"Sally collected baseball cards by the boxful，and she knew the name and batting average of every player in the National League．

　　But major league baseball didn't seem much of a possibility for a girl，even an athletic one like Sally，so her father and mother talked her into taking tennis lessons when she was twelve．At first she hated to trade in her baseball bat for a tennis racket，but it wasn't long before she started to win tournaments in her new sport．"Tennis became much more fun when I started winning，"Sally remembers．

　　Sally first became interested in the space program in 1962when astronaut John Glenn orbited the earth in his Mercury space capsule．Sally was ten years old at the time，but she remembers the launch and the splashdown as if they happened yesterday．The girl who used to memorize batting averages became a space fan．She quickly learned the name of all the eight NASA astronauts，the date of every launch，and the name and number of every spacecraft from Freedom 7to Skylab 3．

　　By the time she was sixteen，Sally had decided to become an astrophysicist．She had also become a nationally ranked tennis player．She remembers yawning through an important tennis match on June 20，1969，after staying up all night to watch Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon．Sally lost the match．As Sally got older，many of her friends started playing professional tennis．Some of them tried to talk her into quitting school to join them on the professional tennis circuit．But Sally said no．"Black holes are more interesting to me than backhands，"she told them．Now she knows that she made the right choice，but in 1970Sally had no way of knowing that NASA would open the space prog