Driving to Succeed : Easterly’s Ever-Present Work Ethic at Katella Helps Make Her the County’s Top Girls’ Player

By now the doubts have been erased. Joni Easterly, a senior at Katella High School, has established herself as the top girls’ basketball player in Orange County.

Easterly, a 5-foot-11 guard, has averaged 22 points and 10 rebounds a game while leading the Knights to a 21-3 record and a No. 3 ranking in the Orange County Sportswriters’ Assn. poll. Katella is 9-0 in the Empire League.

She has done it by being an intense, aggressive player, one of the strongest in the county. Easterly spends hours playing basketball whenever and wherever she can. She is a self-described gym rat, but doesn’t confine herself to the indoors. Any old driveway with a hoop on the garage will do.

As one coach observed this season: “She’s one of those players who can do everything .”

It could be the way she assumes command during games, scoring basket after basket for the Knights. It could be the powerful manner in which she drives to the basket, leaving quick players looking slow. Or the way she pulls up for a soft jump shot with players draped all over her.

Easterly exudes an unmistakable drive to excel on the court, and it has carried her far.

It’s that drive that led her to become the county’s top player. Next season, it will lead her to USC, where she already has signed a letter of intent.

“It’s like there’s this burning inside her to do more,” Katella Coach Barb Bausch said.

And that’s why Easterly rarely misses a day of practice. Off-season, weekends, the day before a big playoff game, Easterly doesn’t miss a chance to dribble or work on her jump shot.

More than once Bausch has had to tell Easterly, who overdoes it occasionally, to cool it, to take a few days off.

“She’s the first player I’ve had to say, ‘Hey, rest,’ ” Bausch said. “I tell her she has so many more games to play in her career and slowing down a little bit isn’t going to hurt.”

The fact is Easterly has hurt herself trying to do too much.

As a sophomore, she was playing one-on-one with a friend in a driveway a few days before a Southern Section 3-A playoff semifinal game. She twisted her ankle on the garage door. At least that’s what she first thought.

The ankle hurt, but she just had to play in that semifinal game. She did, and helped Katella into the championship game against Mission Viejo.

Her ankle hurt, but she still practiced all week in preparation for the big game.

“How often do you get to play in the championship game?” Easterly said.

She went out for pregame warmups at Cal Poly Pomona, but she was in agony. She thought the Katella trainer had taped her ankle too tightly. She started the game, but couldn’t run down the floor more than once and had to come out.

“I couldn’t figure out what was wrong,” Easterly said. “I said, ‘Coach, I gotta play.’ ”

At halftime, she tried to jog in the hallway, but was in such pain she fell.

The next day, after Katella had lost by two points to Mission Viejo, Easterly had her leg X-rayed and learned she had broken a bone just above the ankle.

Looking back, Easterly’s only regret was that she couldn’t play in the game and help her teammates. She said, under the same circumstances, she would still have practiced and played.

“I have to play every day,” she said. “because if I don’t someone else is going to get better than me.”

It was with great reluctance that Easterly sat out last week’s game against El Dorado. She has a strained rib muscle that bothers her each time she shoots or jumps for a ball. A combination of catching too many stray elbows in the ribs and overwork has caused the injury, she said.

“I’ll just have to play sore,” Easterly said. “I’ll just be in pain the rest of the season.”

Playing until she dropped from exhaustion has been her method of operation since she first started playing in sixth grade in Sweet Home, Ore.

The next year, her family moved to Dallas and Easterly really got hooked, playing nightly with a group of college students at a nearby gym.

The next year, the family moved to Anaheim and Easterly attended South Middle School. There she averaged 32 points a game and began to attract attention.

During a summer camp for in-coming freshmen, then-Katella Coach Mickey McAulay told Easterly she’d be playing on the varsity.

Easterly was stunned.

It was then she realized she had a special talent and was determined to see it through.

“She still is going hard, still pushing,” Bausch said. “She could have let up. But winning means a lot more than just getting a scholarship.”