Athlete of the Week: Hendrix keeps busy for Sailors

Katie Hendrix is a student, athlete and coach. She is one busy 16-year-old.

She is taking six honors classes at Newport Harbor High. She plays on the girls’ lacrosse team. She coaches a middle school girls’ lacrosse team.

Hendrix finds the time to do all these activities and she does them at a high level. She said she has a 4.3 weighted grade-point average. She is one of the top players on the Sailors. She inspires younger girls.

The last one is what Newport Harbor Coach Matt Armstrong admires the most about Hendrix.

“For me, there’s the sport, but then there’s like what the sport offers, and it’s the team, the bonding, the camaraderie, the friendship, but then for [girls like Hendrix there are] opportunities for leadership, to give back to the community,” Armstrong said. “[Girls like Hendrix are] literally volunteering their time, just to help girls have a better chance at something that they’ve had a chance with.”

Armstrong calls Hendrix a natural leader. She has definitely guided the Sailors to a historic season.

Hendrix is the first member in her family to lead a Newport Harbor lacrosse team to a perfect league title this year. She hopes the next one is her brother, Cooper, whose boys’ team closes out Sunset League play on Friday against Marina.

Katie’s Sailors won at Esperanza, 11-1, on Thursday, completing the first undefeated Newport Harbor girls’ league championship. Hendrix and the Sailors closed out the regular season by beating the program they shared first place with in the Century Sunset-Empire League last year.

This season, Newport Harbor dominated league, going 8-0, and Hendrix, a junior committed to Arizona State University, has been vital to the success.

Last week, when the Sailors clinched the outright league title in an 11-1 victory against Yorba Linda, Hendrix finished with two goals, three assists, two ground balls and two draws won. She also recorded two goals, two assists and a ground ball in a 14-5 win against El Dorado.

For the season, Hendrix totaled 26 goals, 14 assists, 31 ground balls, and won 40 draws in 16 overall games played. The game that is the most important for Hendrix, a midfielder, comes next week, when the U.S. Lacrosse Southern Section South Division playoffs start.

The past two postseason trips for Hendrix have ended in the same fashion, one-and-done. She and the Sailors look to change things this year in the first round.

Hendrix said the team has already achieved two of the three goals it set out this year. The first was to compete in the Battle of the Bay against archrival Corona del Mar, and the Sailors did in a 9-7 setback. The second goal was to claim the league outright. The third goal is to reach the second round of the playoffs for the first time.

Hendrix and the Sailors learn of their opening-round opponent on Saturday during the release of the playoff pairings. They hope to earn a better seed than the last two postseason appearances when the Sailors were the No. 15 and No. 12 seeds, losing on the road to Foothill, 13-1, last year, and at Mater Dei, 10-2, two years ago.

If Newport Harbor (11-6 overall) has to travel in the first round on Tuesday, Armstrong said his team would be OK. The Sailors are used to playing on the road.

“These girls have shown a lot of resilience in that every game is kind of an away game,” said Armstrong, whose team has played its home games at Estancia High because of renovations at Newport Harbor’s Davidson Field. “We’re getting kind of tossed and turned all around. We drove up to [West Hills to play] Chaminade [and we won, 9-6, on March 18]. We drove down to Temecula [to face Temecula Valley and we won, 11-4, on Tuesday]. We’ve sort of been all over the map, and they’ve showed up to play no matter what. That’s a huge testament to the team and the leadership on the team.”

Hendrix is a vocal leader, and she has learned a few things about coaching from Armstrong, who’s in his fifth season at the helm of the Sailors. Hendrix is in her first year coaching Newport Harbor’s feeder program, Anchor LAX, comprised of sixth- seventh- and eight-grade girls in the Newport Harbor zone.

Hendrix coaches, along with teammates Jordan Rausch and Rylie Siegfried, and Newport Harbor assistant coach Kaleigh Gibbons, a former standout with the Monmouth University women’s lacrosse team.

“It’s so fun to watch them coach,” Armstrong said of his players. “They are really natural. They really interact well with the girls and the girls respond to them. There’s this other part of me that like loves watching them get on the girls’ case for things that I get on their case for. It’s funny because like they will be doing something in practice, and then 20 minutes later, they’ll be like complaining to those girls about what they’re doing.”

Hendrix finds a way to redirect the younger girls during practices at Ensign Intermediate School.

“I always use like the term, ‘It didn’t matter if like Harry kissed Sally today at school, but we need to like focus,’” Hendrix said, before telling them, “We got a game on Saturday. We only have three hours of practice this whole week. We need to just focus for an hour and a half, and like after you can talk about whatever, you can talk about it [during] water breaks, we don’t care, just like don’t talk about it when we’re [practicing or] playing.”

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Katie Hendrix

Born: June 1, 1999

Hometown: Newport Beach

Height: 5-foot-7

Sport: Lacrosse

Year: Junior

Coach: Matt Armstrong

Favorite food: Sushi

Favorite movie: “21 Jump Street”

Favorite athletic moment: “Probably just like rallying against CdM [in a 9-7 loss in the Battle of the Bay rivalry game].”

Week in review: Hendrix finished with two goals, three assists, two ground balls and two draws won, helping the Sailors clinch their first outright league title with an 11-1 win against Yorba Linda. She also recorded two goals, two assists and a ground ball in a 14-5 win against El Dorado in Century Sunset-Empire League action.