Edison’s Big Fish Prefers the Local Waters

Talent and size and potential aside, Kristi Smith’s story, or “Escape From Elsinore, Sans Hang Glider” revolves around ponds.

Big ponds, little ponds.

Smith is the exceptional 6-foot 1-inch senior center for Edison High School. She is strong and mobile, as adept at scoring from the perimeter as she is at scoring inside. She runs well, jumps well. If she stood 5-feet tall she would still be a very good basketball player.

“Without a doubt she is one of the three great players in Orange County,” said Mike Thornton, Marina coach. “Melissa Handley (Fountain Valley), Carrie Egan (Brea-Olinda) and Kristi. . . . It has nothing to do with size, she’s a great player.”

She transferred, then transformed Edison from a very good, very small team of overachievers, into a 25-1 team that is, by consensus, the best team in Orange County this season.

She has set the school single-season scoring record of 496 points (19.1 points per game)--a record she figures to add to in the upcoming 4-A playoffs. She also averages 10 rebounds a game and is making 57% of her shots.

The balance she has provided Edison--the fourth-seeded team in the playoffs--gives Edison a very real chance of winning the 4-A championship.

“Before she got here, if I drove the middle I had to shoot the ball,” said Michelle Hennessey, Edison’s 5-1 point guard. “There was no choice. Now I can drive knowing I can always drop the ball off to her if I get in trouble. With Kristi here, we can just do a lot more things as a team.”

Hennessey, a senior, is in her fourth and final season as an Edison starter. Off-guard Denise Ogburn, also a senior, is in her third and final season. Dave White, Edison coach, coaches the football team and has announced this will be his last season as the girls’ coach.

All three have been through hard times at Edison, and all three have been responsible for raising the program beyond respectability. But it wasn’t until Smith arrived this summer that Edison became a power.

“I think we’re still a very good team without Kristi Smith,” White said. “I think we would have won the Sunset League anyway, but I don’t think we would have gone 10-0. I know we wouldn’t be 25-1 this season.”

Which brings us back to the pond, a very small one--according to Kristi Smith--called Elsinore High School.

Smith played her first three seasons of high school basketball at Elsinore. Located in Lake Elsinore (population 5,982), the school competes in the Southern Section’s 1-A division in girls’ basketball, which means most of its games are against smaller schools and most of the competition Smith ran up against was no competition at all.

“There were some good players, but most of the time the competition I was playing against wasn’t that strong,” she said.

Smith dominated most opponents, regularly picked up such honors as All-Sunkist League and All-Southern Section, and came to long for something more. A bigger pond.

“Lake Elsinore was just too small. Real small,” she said. “There is one stop light, and they just got that a couple of years ago. There was only one McDonald’s.”

Enough said.

Smith was born in Huntington Beach. She had grown up across the street from Marina High School and knew all about Sunset League high schools, with big enrollments and high-profile athletic programs. Smith thought she would be part of all that as an eighth-grader, but one day her father, Mike, came home and said the family was moving to Lake Elsinore.

It seems Mike was going to quit his job at McDonnell Douglas and open a hang-gliding park in Lake Elsinore.

“He was really excited about the idea,” Smith said. “I really wasn’t happy about leaving.”

Three years later, after the hang-gliding park had soared its course, the Smiths were ready to come home. A home was found, in Marina’s enrollment district, and Kristi prepared herself to finally attend the school she had always wished to.

“Her coach had called me and told me I was going to get a pretty good ballplayer,” said Thornton. “I was looking forward to it.”

But all that fell through with the house’s escrow, and Smith started to panic about a lifetime in Elsinore. However, Mike Smith did find a house in Huntington Beach--in Edison’s district.

“I got a call from the coach,” White said. “He said I was getting an all-CIF player. That sounded good, but I wasn’t sure. Since she got that playing in the 1-A.”

As far as long-anticipated arrivals go, Smith’s wasn’t.

“Honestly, I thought she was bad,” Hennessey said. “Since we’re a small team, we’re always supposed to get these big players who are going to help us out. But they usually turn out to be pretty bad. I thought she was another. I didn’t let myself get too excited.”

Smith wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence that first day of practice.

“I was so nervous,” she said. “I’d always wanted to play at a big school, but once I got there I didn’t know if I was good enough.”

She was, and White couldn’t be happier.

“This is a great way to end it,” he said.

Hennessey couldn’t be happier.

“The first time I saw her go through layup drills I said, ‘Oh-oh. She’s going to be good and so are we.’ ”

The odd man out in this happy little scenario is Thornton, who has been left to ponder what might have been.

“We played a great game against Edison in league,” he said. “Probably the best game we’ve played all year. She (Smith) scores 32 points and they win by 10. After you see something like that, your mind tends to wonder, ‘What if?’

“It doesn’t hurt me too much. Those are the breaks, and if I had to lose a player to anyone I’m glad it was to Dave White. But I think it’s just human nature to wonder.”

As for Kristi Smith--bona fide big fish, “I’m so glad the way things worked out. This is the best.”

And so, as far as Edison is concerned, is Kristi Smith.