When Sally Ride was ten years old, she had no idea that she would some day grow up to be one of America's first woman astronauts. In fact, if you had asked her then what wanted to be, she would have said, " I want to play shortstop 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. Soon a row of trophies  replaced her box of baseball cards, and tennis star Billie Jean King replaced Dodger shortstop Maury Wills as her sports idol. Sally first became interested in the space program in 1962 when 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 every NASA astronaut(there were only eight of them in 1962), the date of every launch, and the name and number of every spacecraft from Freedom 7 to Skylab 3. She could tell you the speed of light (186,300 miles per second), the distance to the moon (238,860 miles), and the names of the three nearest stars( the Sun, Alpha Centauri, and Barnard's Star). By the time she was sixteen, Sally had decided to become an astrophysicist, a scientist who studies space. 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 1970 Sally had no way of knowing that NASA would open the space program to women. From the story we know that Sally   _  .
had been a professional baseball player had never been a professional player had never been a woman astrophysicist wasn't interested in space program