For most 13-year-olds, a visit to the US Women's Open at Pine Needles in North Carolina today will mean a chance to wallow in admiration, collect some autographs to impress their class-mates and dream of how, maybe, just maybe, one day it could be them, writes Elspeth Burnside.

But Morgan Pressel, who only became a teenager last Wednesday, is no US Open wannabe. The chance to play alongside her heroines has arrived today. Two weeks ago she earned her place in the greatest women's event of all when she shot a two-under-par 70 at Bear Lakes in Florida to win the sectional qualifying event. Over the next four days she will be bunking school and enjoying equal status with the world number one Annika Sorenstam and the defending champion Karrie Webb.

Pressel comes from a sporting family - her tennis-playing uncle Aaron Krickstein beat Vitas Gerulaitis in the 1983 US Open at the age of 16 - and she started playing golf at the age of eight. Her grandfather Herb Krickstein entered her for the US Open qualifying. "I wasn't fast enough to become really good at tennis. But I shot my best score of 69 in Florida last year, and grandpa thought I might as well give it a go for the Open," she said.

Meanwhile, Sorenstam, the only woman with a chance to duplicate Tiger Woods' Grand Slam this year, had some advice for Pressel: "She should just enjoy it. I just started playing golf when I was 12. I think my handicap at the time was 63, so you can imagine how many shots I made in 18 holes."

Sorenstam has dominated women's golf this year, winning five LPGA events already including the first major, the Nabisco Championship. Now she returns to Pine Needles, where she won the Women's Open five years ago.

"This is the first time I've thought about having a chance of doing the Grand Slam, because I've never won the Nabisco before," she said, displaying sound logic.

"It's fun to think about it, but I don't want to think any further than this week. I've gotten off to a great start to the year and winning the Nabisco was really a dream come true. It was the first major I'd won in a few years (since the '96 Open)."

Also among her competitors this week will be Brenda Corrie Kuehn, who is eight months pregnant. "I've never been pregnant," Sorenstam said. "I don't really know how it would feel."