No way, she told her parents.

She’d go on any ride at Disney World except for one. The Tower of Terror. (That’s the ride in Hollywood Studios that takes you 13 stories high in the freight elevator of a doomed old hotel, then drops you to the Twilight Zone.)

Few kids would call Jazmin Meyer-King a chicken. The 11-year-old is the only girl in the Lincoln Sharks football league. She plays right guard.

“She takes her helmet off after games,” says her dad, Richard King, “and it’s like, ‘So THAT’S who was kicking our butts out there?’”

She plays basketball for the Lincoln Katz, practicing every day after school in the Salvation Army’s gym. She wants to play in the WNBA.

She’s a class leader at Clinton Elementary, tutors peers, breezes through her high-ability classes. She loves math.

For all of those reasons, when Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlain, a Lincoln native, asked the Clinton Elementary principal to pick a kid from his old neighborhood to come to Disney World with her family as his guests for four days, the principal chose Jazmin.

They spent last weekend in Orlando.

Joba, in Tampa for spring training, paid for everything: The air fare; the SUV and the driver awaiting them at the airport; the deluxe rooms at Disney’s Wilderness Lodge overlooking the beach; the VIP treatment, front of the line on every ride; the private escort lady who took them anywhere they wanted to go and paid for anything they wanted to eat.

The best part?

“Meeting Joba,” Jazmin says, smiling.

He was tall. He was real nice. He asked her about Lincoln. He encouraged her to keep working hard in school and sports because hard work pays off.

“He told me he was proud of me.”

She met him last Sunday when she and her family were his VIP guests to an annual fan festival called “ESPN the Weekend” at Hollywood Studios. They hung with him as Joba got mic-ed up for interviews. They sat in the front row and watched him compete with other stars in a sports trivia game show.

There were many sports stars there that day. But to Jazmin, the one people wanted to be near the most was Joba.

At the end of the day, as people were streaming out of Hollywood Studios, Joba told Jazmin and her family that he just had to do one more thing with them before they said goodbye.

His words made Jazmin’s stomach drop.

We’re going to the Tower of Terror!

The workers at the ride happily agreed to run it one more time for the VIPs. Trying to hide her terror, Jazmin entered the “freight elevator.” She sat down next to Joba, buckled herself in.

Plunged to her doom.

Screamed and screamed.

But it was OK, she says.

Because Joba did, too.

Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.