Coral Gables, Fla., in late December. But holiday parties are the last thing on the minds of the young tennis players.

	With Jennifer Capriati (center) and sisters Venus (left) and Serena Williams, Rick Macci was coaching three of today's best female tennis players -- in 1990.

As the best young tennis players in the world compete in the Junior Orange Bowl tournament, agents from the world's top management houses – SFX, IMG, Octagon among them – assess the talent. The players, aged from 11 to 18, actually know who many of them are and sneak peeks at the stands between points.

The pressure is palpable.

"There's pressure on all the agents because we're all after the same thing: the best players we can find," said IMG's Tony Godsick. "There's pressure on the players because they know what's going on and why we're there."

Like everything else in life, this isn't the way it used to be.

"In the mid-'80s, you'd go to the Orange Bowl pretty much naïve and unassuming," said Rick Macci, who coached Jennifer Capriati and sisters Serena and Venus Williams as youngsters. "There would be maybe one, two agents that would show up. It certainly wasn't the norm.

"Today ... well, it doesn't smell the greatest when they're signing 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds to contracts. There will be 15, 20 agents putting the full-court press on the brother, the mother, the sister and probably the family dog. It's amazing, to say the least."

The chaotic, unsavory scene in South Florida also plays out every year in places like Kalamazoo, Mich.; Paris, France; Bradenton, Fla.; and Palm Springs, Calif., where everyone is looking for the next Martina Hingis or Pete Sampras.

Not only are the agents out hustling, but the big clothing, shoe and equipment manufacturers are lurking by the chain-link fences, too. The representatives of Nike, Adidas, Reebok and others are throwing around free merchandise, trying to beat the agents to the punch. The deals are a lot more palatable when those bothersome agents aren't involved.

Major corporations have been recruiting the best university talent for years in places like Cambridge, Mass.; New Haven, Conn.; and Stanford, Calif. In tennis, the major junior tournaments are where the action is. Those agents and manufacturer representatives will be working the Junior French Open for the next two weeks at Roland Garros in Paris.

Long odds
Ivan Brixi, who coordinates women's tennis for Octagon, has been an Orange Bowl regular for years. Recently, he was transferred to the corporate office in Beijing, China.

"I've only been here a short time," he said recently from China on his cell phone. "We needed to beef up our presence in Asia, where sports is really growing.

	Yugoslavia's Jelena Dokic, now 18 years old, had that special something on the tennis court that attracted agencies seeking to represent her. She signed with Octagon when she was 14.

"Occasionally, you will see tennis talent at 10 and just know it. We signed Steffi Graf at 13 and Jelena Dokic at 14, but they are exceptions to the rule. Generally, we try to recruit players that are 15 or older. Exceptional players? Everybody's always looking for that exceptional player that stands out."

Finding that exception to the rule is like buying a winning Powerball ticket. Actually, the odds might be longer.

"If you find a young athlete who truly is gifted, the odds are distant that anyone at 9, 10 or 11 will be a phenom at 18," said Rick Burton, director of University of Oregon's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. "Say you find that needle in the haystack. Can you make the investment, which is considerable, pay off?"

Said IMG's Godsick: "You have to be resourceful. In Germany, we'll hear from a coach who says, 'Come out and watch this 12-year-old play.' It's somewhat of a guessing game. We like to think we guess better than anyone."

David Schwab of Octagon is Anna Kournikova's agent. Age, he insists, is not a factor when judging talent.

"When you find good talent, you find good talent. It doesn't matter if they're 25 or 12 – you know it when you see it."

So what is the payoff?

When Venus Williams broke through with her first two Grand Slam singles titles last year, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, all the front-end support by Reebok was rewarded.

"We began a relationship with Venus when she was 11 year old; she was a member of our junior team," explained Dianne Hayes, director of tennis marketing for Reebok. "We provided her with products and when she turned pro in 1995, she signed an endorsement deal. We always hoped she would start and finish her career with Reebok."

Just to make sure, Reebok lavished a five-year, $40 million endorsement deal on Williams in late December. It was the largest deal ever for a female athlete. Can Reebok possibly sell enough sneakers to recoup that investment?

"A conversation like that would never happen – we don't even attempt to try [to do the math]," Hayes said. "When you're a global icon and you have appeal, it's costly. There are only a handful of athletes with that kind of appeal. At some stage, you have to pay their market value.

"You just hope you have a relationship with the athlete and that they will show their loyalty. Venus gives us an incredible amount of exposure and we think it's the right investment."

	Bloodlines -- her mother was a Russian track star and her brother plays for the Buffalo Sabres -- made Rick Macci want to coach Katia Afinogenova.

Answering the call
Three years ago the phone rang at Rick Macci's tennis center in Pompano Beach, Fla. It was the agent for Buffalo Sabres winger Maxim Afinogenov. He wondered if Macci would consider tutoring Maxim's little sister, Katia Afinogenova.

Macci sighed. He gets "hundreds" of these calls all the time. But when the agent said that Katia's mother was a seven-time Russian 800-meter champion, Macci suspended his disbelief. A student of genetics, Macci factored in the family success in track and hockey and promptly said yes.

"Everybody has a flavor of the month," Macci said. "But being the best in your state or best in your country doesn't mean stardom. This sounded different. I said, 'Can you get a ticket tomorrow?' "

Last year Macci signed Afinogenova, then 13, to a 10-year contract that guarantees him a percentage of her future winnings. There are bonuses and paybacks when she turns pro, but Macci is betting hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money that Afinogenova is going to be a player.

"I took a chance with Venus and Serena and Capriati," Macci said. "Katia has a chance to succeed at their level."

Afinogenova, now 14, won't matriculate to the WTA Tour full time for at least two more years. Ashley Harkelroad, a 15-year-old from Wesley Chapel, Fla., already has debuted on the professional circuit. She played her first WTA match in March at the Ericsson Open, losing to Miriam Oremans in three sets.

Blonde and pretty, she has drawn the inevitable comparisons with Kournikova.

	“	They just want there to be a [Anna] Kournikova, but from the U.S., I guess. I hope I can be that. ”
		— Ashley Harkelroad, a 15-year-old tennis prodigy

"They just want there to be a Kournikova, but from the U.S., I guess," Harkelroad said. "I hope I can be that."

AMG Sports, Nike and Babolat, a French racket maker, are hoping right along with her. Her stellar junior career – Harkelroad won the Easter Bowl's 18-year-old division as a 14-year-old – drew many suitors, but AMG, with its ties to the entertainment industry, eventually won out. Harkelroad, it turns out, wants to be an actress after tennis.

Earlier this year, AMG worked a deal with Nike that will bring Harkelroad more than $75,000 a year.

Like all ambitious juniors, Harkelroad trains hard. A new four-year study of USTA boys and girls suggests that junior players are training too hard, too early. The study, conducted by Dr. Marc Safran of Kaiser Permanente in California and Dr. Mark Hutchinson of the University of Illinois-Chicago discovered that nearly one in five players suffered new or recurring injuries during the high-profile week-long tournaments. Injuries sidelined 77 percent of the girls and 55 percent of the boys for a week or more.

At the Easter Bowl in Palm Springs in April, 47 players withdrew because of injuries and 212 were treated by trainers for injuries or injury prevention.

"That's alarming," Tom Gullikson, director of coaching for USA Tennis player development told the Los Angeles Times. "That's a high number of injuries, especially for the first big tournament of the year."

Bart McGuire, outgoing CEO of the WTA, said he believes the organization's age-eligibility rules, implemented in 1995 after a year of study, protect today's young players more than ever.

"It was virtually unanimous that playing at 14 full-time was wrong," McGuire said. "The fundamental reasons for it were one, they were likely to be more susceptible to injury, two, adapting to stresses of the tour is a difficult process and, three, the junior development people said if 14- and 15-year-old kids were vying to get to the semifinals of the U.S. Open, they'd rely on what got them there and their development would be adversely affected.

"That's why we set parameters for matches for 14-, 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds. I think they're signing up people a year or two later than they used to. I think we have deferred that process somewhat. I think it's better for the kid. That said, these players are subject to enormous pressures from sponsors, agents and tournaments. They're subject to enormous scrutiny in the press.

"Most of us, when we weaned ourselves from our parents, we did it with only a few people watching. These kids don't have that luxury."

Greg Garber is a senior staff writer for ESPN.com.