This season is full of firsts for the Orcutt Academy High School girls’ varsity tennis team.
Head coach Art Lopez leads the varsity team for the first time this season with players who are new to competitive tennis, and the team is competing for the first time in the Los Padres League.
For being the new team on the court, the Spartan girls are holding their own. The team’s league record is 4-2, which puts the Spartans in third place with an overall record of 7-4.
“It’s been a pleasant surprise,” Lopez said. “They’ve really stepped up.”
These numbers are impressive for a team with many of its girls playing their first matches at the varsity level. The team has a lot of new players and is mostly made up of sophomores—the team has two freshman, five sophomores, two juniors, and two seniors.
“We’re relatively a very young, inexperienced team,” Lopez said. “We’ve had some growing pains.”
The team’s biggest issue isn’t a lack of tennis skills, but rather that many of the girls lack experience and confidence, Lopez said.
Going up against more experienced opponents intimidates the young players on the court, Lopez said.
But their hesitance is dwindling as they partake in more matches, and despite their youth, they’ve been able to stay competitive.
One young varsity team member who is making a difference is Keona Pablo, a 14-year-old freshman who plays doubles.
“She has skills that a typical freshman doesn’t have,” Lopez said. “She’s fearless and hits the ball hard.”
Her overall match record is 21-8. She went 3-0 with her doubles partner, Kelsey Namba, against Morro Bay on Sept. 30. The girls’ strategy against the Pirates was to move their opponents around the court, Pablo said. In the last set of a match against the Pirates’ No. 1 doubles team, Pablo and Namba came back for the win after being down two games.
“She never gives up,” assistant coach Tara Childs said about Pablo. “When the scores are down, she keeps coming at ’em.”
During that last game of the Morro Bay match-up, they rallied for a long time, going to deuce a lot, and drawing out the length of the sets, Pablo said.
Namba, who is a sophomore, helped Pablo stay calm when the freshman began stressing out about having to win.
“She makes me laugh, and it calms me down,” Pablo said.
The team’s surprising capability can be attributed in part to the level of comfort the girls have with each other, Pablo said.
Early in the season, they bonded at a team sleepover where they discussed each other’s goals and fears, and that helped put everyone on the same page, Childs said.
The coaches focus on building team unity in practice as well. They renamed what are commonly called “challenge matches” to “practice matches,” Childs said.
Teammates play each other in these practice matches to see who is the better player, which determine who will play in a particular spot at the upcoming match. The coaches changed the name in order to keep the pressure off, Childs said.
“We’re not going to fight each other,” she said. “We’re all a team.”
Even though the high school has had a varsity tennis program for six years, the team wasn’t able to join the Los Padres League earlier because league membership only opens up every six years, Orcutt Academy High Athletic Director Chad McKenzie said.
Since it opened in 2008, the charter school has attempted to join other leagues such as the Coast Valley League, but was denied admittance because of the distance teams would have to travel to compete.
This year, all of the sports programs at Orcutt Academy are competing in the Los Padres League for the first time.
“We’re right in the middle of every sport,” McKenzie said about the teams’ standings. “Our sports are showing that we’re competitive across the board.”
Playing in the league is different from playing as a freelance team, Lopez said. Some of the pressure is off, because the top four league teams make it to CIF. A freelance team has to work harder to make it to CIF because they need an impressive record with at least 15 wins, Lopez said.
The Spartans’ girls’ tennis team has made it to CIF every year since the program started, and the team’s best record was 21-2.
The best teams in the league are Santa Ynez Union High School and Cabrillo High School, Lopez said.
The Spartans are halfway through the season and have had a chance to play against every team. With that experience behind them, the girls will be better equipped for the second half of their season, Lopez said. Along with having new players on the team, it’s also Lopez’s first season as head varsity coach, which is more of a 50/50 effort with his assistant coach, he said.
“We’re doing well for a young team,” Childs said. “We’re learning as we go.”
Contact Staff Writer Aaron Salazar at asalazar@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 9-16, 2014.