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Here's a good description of her playing when she was only 10 from, "I've just met a girl named Maria" by Simon Worrall:

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As I watched Maria Sharapova sink to her knees and cover her face with her hands as she became the third-youngest winner of the women’s title at Wimbledon, I thought back to my own game with “Masha”, as she is known to family and friends. It was April 1998 and I had flown to Bradenton, Florida, from New York to do a feature about the Bollettieri tennis academy for Harpers & Queen magazine. Masha was only 10 at the time, but the courts were already buzzing about the willowy girl from Siberia with the crushing ground strokes and the winsome smile.

At the age of 9 she had become the first child athlete to sign a million-dollar contract with IMG, the Chicago-based International Management Group. Prince had already signed her up to use their rackets. Oakley supplied her with sunglasses. When she needed new tennis gear, she told me, all she had to do was call Nike. “If she goes on developing as she is at the moment,” Bollettieri said as we watched her hit on a practice court, “she could become the next great female player. A new Hingis or Navratilova.”

Off the court she was like any other ten-year-old. She liked the Spice Girls; had a hamster called Mel; grumbled about long car trips and training too hard. She was a delightful child: bright, funny, with an effervescent personality and a bubbly sense of humour. Even then she brimmed with self-confidence. When I asked her whose game she admired most, she said with a grin: “Mine.”

On the court she reminded me of the margay, a small wild cat, like a miniature leopard, that lives in the jungles of Central America. Her emerald-green eyes had the look of a creature who you knew would never quite belong to anyone but herself. She was still only “peanut-sized”, as her father, Yuri, called her, with long, skinny legs and arms, corn-blonde hair, braces on her teeth and a dusting of freckles on her nose. But when she went to strike the ball, her little cat-face would bunch into a snarl, her body would coil itself like a spring behind her racket, she would hurl herself at the ball and, with an ear-splitting banshee scream that sent shivers down your spine, unleash a laser-guided ground stroke.

No girl in the history of tennis had hit a tennis ball as hard as Maria Sharapova. As Bollettieri, who has masterminded the careers of plenty of hard-hitters, including Monica Seles and Mary Pierce, eloquently put it: “She beats the f****** crap out of the ball.” But it wasn’t the sheer force of her ground strokes — the same strokes that rocked Serena Williams, the Mike Tyson of women’s tennis, back on her heels on Saturday — that already set Masha apart from the other child wonders clawing their way towards wealth and fame at Bollettieri’s academy. It was that she had a tennis brain.

“Maria possesses all the ingredients to become a superstar,” Mike DePalmer, one of the head coaches at the academy, told me. “She knows the tennis court. She possesses an innate skill. She has a terrific work ethic. She is very coachable. She is like a sponge.”

Like all the greats, she has a radar-like ability to anticipate exactly where her opponent’s ball will land the moment it leaves the strings of their racket — and to be there when it does. The player to whom she was being compared most was Chris Evert. When Evert first saw Masha hit she said: “I’m glad I am not playing now.”