When the Open begins tomorrow, the court will be taken over by big-name players, but now it is yours, blue and flawless, a perfect rectangle of possibility. You are sure the point is over. You begin to turn to walk back to the baseline for the next point, when you see a blur across the net, blonde and broad-shouldered, a Jersey girl all grown up, digging toward the corner.

"There is no way," you tell yourself.

"I can get this ball," your opponent tells herself.

Karin Korb is six feet tall, though you wouldn't know it if she didn't tell you, because you never see her standing up. She keeps digging. Deep in the right corner, she reaches down and gets her racket on the ball and suddenly it is on its way back, down the line. You try to restart your engine, but it's too late. You have paid for your moment of hubris.

The point belongs to Korb, former Homecoming Queen of Clifton (N.J.) High School, now a 37-year-old trailblazer from suburban Atlanta, and the No. 3-ranked tennis player in the nation in the wheelchair category. At a recent tournament in Stamford, she defeated an able-bodied player, the only concession to her disability being that she got two bounces to get to the ball, instead of one.

Korb much prefers playing it on one.

"It's my utmost joy in tennis when I can get to a drop shot, or a ball people don't think I can reach," Korb says. "I am not a technical tennis player, but I am going to make you hit another ball to beat me." She pauses and smiles. "I am going to out-cardio you all day long," she says.

When the U.S. Open closes shop two weeks from now, the men's singles champion won't be the only person hoisting a trophy at the National Tennis Center. There will also be champions in the Open's inaugural Wheelchair Competition.

In a summer that has brought the release of the acclaimed documentary "Murderball," a film about quadriplegic rugby players, athletes in wheelchairs are being seen, perhaps more than ever, not so much as a sports sideshow, or people to pity, but rather as human beings with the same needs and passions and issues as Roger Federer, Maria Sharapova or anyone else on the planet.

"Anytime the media portrays us - and I am speaking very loosely as people with disabilities - this way, it changes the perception of a gazillion people in about 30 seconds," Korb says.

Gazillion is one of Korb's favorite words. She says it all the time, energy and enthusiasm coursing through her at such a pace you wonder if she's plugged in. There are so many places she wants to go, so much she wants to do, mostly in her role as national program manager for BlazeSports America, a venture of the U.S. Disabled Athletes Fund, with a mission to make community-based sports available to people with physical disabilities.

When she wakes up each day, she says, out loud, "Today is a whole new adventure." She follows with a 40-minute cardiovascular workout. She does three gratitude meditations a day, and is grateful for the way it centers her.

She loves to challenge herself and push herself in ways big and small. Every few days she brushes her teeth lefthanded, just because it is different. She can do 10 pullups and tries to do more, just because it is hard. She doesn't have a TV in her home, because it's too easy.

"I want to create new pathways in my brain. I don't want to stay in my comfort zone," Korb says.

Lloyd Garden is Korb's personal trainer. He says that he's never met anyone more relentlessly positive than Korb.

"I constantly have to motivate people to do their workouts," Garden says. "When she comes in, she motivates me. I just want to give her my all."

Karin Korb has been in her wheelchair for 20 years. She was a 17-year-old junior at Clifton High School when she got hurt, at a gymnastics meet in Carlstadt, N.J. It was April 1985. Korb was taking her last practice vault of the night. She sprinted down the approach, hit her takeoff and sprung over the vault, spinning through the air like a leaf. She missed her landing. She broke her back.

"The moment I hit the mat, I knew I was paralyzed," Korb says. She was devastated at first, and so were her parents, Robert and Hedwig Korb, who emigrated from Germany in the 1960s. "I was like Barbie. I was extraordinarily vain," Karin says. "Being in a chair was my greatest fear. I thought everyone in a chair had a cognitive disability."

When she was voted most popular in her class and Homecoming Queen a year later, it didn't lessen her feelings. "I cried my face off because I felt ugly," she says.

Says Hedwig Korb, "It was a very hard time. It was so hard to accept such a turnaround overnight."

Hedwig Korb always made sure her family ate right; everything was made from scratch, never frozen. After the accident, Hedwig helped Karin fight off anemia with a diet of spinach, strawberries and liver. Robert provided kindness and strength, and an unyielding will that his daughter would need to borrow from. Older sister Simone helped with large helpings of tough love. "She never let me play the gimp card," Karin says.

Karin got through surgery and the rods in her back, and severe allergic reactions to the pain medication, and gradually her attitude turned around. When she shifted her goal from trying to walk again to trying to live again, she began to flourish. Her natural ebullience resurfaced. As she went through a long and grueling rehab, her physical therapists ordered her to see a psychiatrist.

"They thought I was too happy," Korb says, laughing.

Korb went to Kean University and later got a graduate degree in sports management from Georgia State University, where she was among the first wheelchair tennis players in the country to get an athletic scholarship - no small achievement for someone who'd never held a racket until she was 27.

Korb started playing at the urging of a friend, who told her it would be a great aerobic workout. Korb, by her own admission, is compulsive about her fitness. She thought of tennis as the snooty domain of the country-club set, but gave it a try and soon was hooked.

Even without the smoothest of strokes, she has competed in the last two Paralympics in Sydney and Athens, and represented the U.S. nine times in all. She comes into the Open ranked No. 25 in the world - and the only athlete in the 16-player wheelchair field who once worked the Open as an intern, in the U.S. Tennis Association's communication department. Korb was ecstatic when she found out in the spring that her next role would be as a pioneer, in the new wheelchair division.

"Our aim is to grow the sport of tennis on a very inclusive basis," says Franklin Johnson, new president of the USTA.

A few minutes after her hitting session in the Grandstand is over, Korb is wheeling amid the wind currents beneath Louis Armstrong Stadium. Maria Sharapova, the new No. 1 player in the world and reigning glamour girl of the sport, walks by with a small entourage en route to her own workout. Korb doesn't seem to notice. She is joking about how she is a feminist concealed with lip gloss, talking about how inclusive tennis is, about her new program called Disabled Divas, a camp for young girls in wheelchairs. She keeps on wheeling, though she can't seem to go more than 20 feet without running into someone who knows her and wants to hug her. Someone calls Korb the mayor of Flushing Meadows. It isn't far wrong.

When Karin was 2%BD , she was at the supermarket with her mother and told half the store about the new shoes her grandmother had given her. She was so focused on the shoes that she wound up losing her mother. "I can't find my mother. I am lost," she told the first shopper she encountered. Neither the verbal skills, nor the poise, has lessened. The same goes for her faith in the basic goodness of people. "I believe every single person on the planet has value," Korb says. "They have wisdom to impart to me, if I am paying attention."

To Karin Korb, tennis is a good working paradigm for life. If you want to be awake and effective, you have to be in the moment. You can't be thinking about the forehand you just jacked, or the volley you just flubbed. You need to forgive yourself your mistakes and move on, stay present, stay positive.

"My life so does not revolve around my disability or not walking," she says.

Near the fountains outside Arthur Ashe Stadium, Korb gets stopped for the gazillionth time, and you're struck by how strong she looks in her chair. People tell her all the time that she is inspirational. She doesn't get it. "I'm just living my life," she says.

Robert and Hedwig Korb may not get to the National Tennis Center to see their daughter compete in the Open; Robert Korb is ill with cancer. He was in the hospital getting a blood transfusion last week. Karin can't wait to get home and eat "Mommy food" and be with her family. She understands that illness and injury are sometimes part of the journey. She fights hard not to be afraid of it, because she doesn't want to live a life of fear, but of passion and commitment.

If her God came to her tomorrow and granted her three wishes, Korb says being able to get out of her chair and walk again would not make the list. World peace and eliminating hunger and finding more compassion in the world would.

Korb doesn't know who she will be playing in the first official Wheelchair Competition of the U.S. Open 11 days from now, but it won't much matter. She'll be ready to roll and make her opponents hit one more shot, going after the day's adventure, looking as strong as any player at the National Tennis Center.

"I'm very content with my life," Karin Korb says. "I just happen to sit."