Going Out Together : Edison’s White, Hennessey and Ogburn Have High Hopes for Final Season

The natural order dictates that first comes work, then comes success and then everyone sits around in a living room-type atmosphere--beverages optional--and talks about the hard work and all the success it brought.

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the good old days.

There are those, of course, who defy the natural order. Now before you blurt duckbill platypus, consider the Edison High School girls’ basketball team.

It is a team that features small wonders, the head football coach and, after a week, the best player in Orange County. It is a team that, after a week, is the best in the county. And it is a team whose past is its present.

Meet Michelle Hennessey, Denise Ogburn and Dave White--the past, present and soon to be past of Edison girls’ basketball.

Whatever awaits the Chargers this season--a lot, from all indications--it will come because once upon a time these three struggled and worked their way up slow and small and unnoticed. Sure, a lot of that has to do with that transfer student from Elsinore High, Kristi Smith. That’s 6-foot 1-inch Kristi Smith, who moves as if she’s 5-6 and may be the best player in the county. She was named the most valuable player of the recently concluded Irvine Tournament, in which Edison defeated nationally ranked Brea-Olinda in the final.

But for the most part, the Chargers remain the team of Hennessey, Ogburn and White. Consider that in the Irvine final, Ogburn led Edison in scoring with 18 points and Hennessey made two free throws late in the game to clinch the victory.

Ogburn is 5-4 and Hennessey is 5-2. White is about 6-0, which doesn’t matter much since he’s the coach. Hennessey and Ogburn are guards. They form, perhaps, the best backcourt in Orange County, and they are seniors.

Now, no tears for Ogburn and Hennessey. Graduation is another fact of the natural order. What makes their story, and White’s, so interesting is that they have built a program together through hard work, respect and friendship. And they will leave it together at the end of this season.

Neat and tidy.

It was five years ago that Dave White found himself walking through the park that lies across the street from Edison High. He wandered into the recreation center and found the usual assortment of YMCA regulars.

As he watched, though, he noticed a little something different. That little something was Michelle Hennessey, who stood all of 4-11.

“She was mixing it up with those guys, going a mile a minute,” White said. “I saw her play a couple of more times and I knew, she was my point guard.”

Hennessey was in eighth grade at the time. Her father, Mike, had died a few months earlier.

“Coach became like a dad to me,” she said. “I always used to shoot baskets with my dad, then I started to shoot with Coach White. It got so that we talked about a lot of other things than basketball.”

When she finally reached Edison, Hennessey did become Edison’s starting point guard as a freshman. A dream come true it was, until the season started.

“That first year was really tough,” Hennessey said. “Every time we got in a jam the ball was thrown to me. I was just a freshman. I wanted the ball, but not all the time.”

Enter Ogburn, who had played her freshman year of high school ball in Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, Ogburn had a lot of speed with no place to go.

“They play that half-court game in Oklahoma,” Ogburn said. “Players are only allowed on one half of the court. It was horrible. I hated it.”

So Ogburn arrives and is greeted by White, who introduces her to Hennessey, both sides of the court and sweat.

“I worked them like crazy that year,” White said. “But that didn’t matter since they’re both like me. They’re intense. They want to be pushed. I treat them the same way I treated the boys.”

The boys are the Edison varsity football team. At the time, White was an assistant coach. He has just completed his first season as head coach.

Trying to coach girls’ basketball and football would be a burden no matter where someone coached. The seasons overlap.

But trying to do it at Edison, arguably the highest profile football program in the county, now that’s pushing it.

Most people in the Edison athletic department understood and were ready for White to step down from his duties as basketball coach once he had been named to head the football program.

“I think some of them thought it would probably just be too much for me to handle,” White said. “At times, I think they might be right. But I knew I had to come back this year. I had to see this through, especially for Michelle and Denise.”

And so White has endured days that begin at 7 a.m. with freshman football weightlifting and don’t conclude until basketball is over at 8 p.m. He won’t again, though. White has announced that this is his last basketball season.

When the pair were freshmen, they took third place in the Sunset League, perhaps the toughest league in Orange County.

As juniors, with one of the smallest teams in the county, they went 21-7 and finished second in the league.

Hennessey and Ogburn were named to the all-league team, and many thought that White did the premier coaching job in the county last season. What he did was tell Hennessey and Ogburn to run. A good move, as his center last season stood 5-9.

This season, they are heavy favorites to win the league and are given a good chance to go pretty far in the 4-A playoffs.

“We’re looking forward to what happens this year,” Ogburn said. “In a way it’s sad that it’s all come together now, but it has come together.”

Neat and tidy.