By Bill Spring

Maureen Rankine, center, founder of Tennis Against Breast Cancer, Inc., gives Geri Vogel, left, and John Van Lokeren, right, a few tennis tips.

Maureen Rankine has gone from bettering a good serve to serving the better good.

Eight years ago, she was a full-time tennis teacher and coach. Today, Rankine devotes nearly all her time to Tennis Against Breast Cancer, the nonprofit charity she founded in 1996 to increase awareness about the disease and raise funds to help fight it.

It's amazing that Rankine even ended up in tennis. In the 1970s, she was a teenager growing up, as she puts it, "on the wrong side of the tracks" in her hometown of Montego Bay, Jamaica. The second-eldest of nine children, Rankine played cricket and ran track despite suffering from severe asthma.

But because almost all the tennis courts on the island were at exclusive tourist resorts and hotels, Rankine did not get a chance to play the sport until she was in her mid-teens, when she could work in pro shops or retrieve balls in exchange for court time. She quickly developed a killer game.

Rankine earned her first money as a tennis player by standing in for the absent doubles partner of a vacationing American chicken farmer. The man gave her $20. "Next summer, I saw him on TV," say Rankine. "He was Frank Perdue."

By the time she was 20, Rankine was one of the top three tennis players in Jamaica. In 1981, she won a scholarship to attend Broward Community College in Florida, and then went on to Murray State University in Kentucky, where she led the team to its first conference championship. She was named a Collegiate All-American in 1983.

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