Royal, Back on Course, Avoids Sinking Feeling : Highlanders’ Water Polo Team Overcomes Key Player Losses to Win Ninth Consecutive Marmonte League Championship

Steve Snyder blanched when he heard the news, then tried to steady himself. Hank Toring, a chief booster of Snyder’s Royal High water polo program and the coach’s close friend, might just as well have punched him in the stomach.

After a lengthy meeting in June in which the two men ironed out details for the team’s summer trip to Hawaii, Snyder noticed the troubled look on Toring’s face.

“I could tell something was wrong with him, but I didn’t have a clue,” Snyder said.

Soon, it was Snyder who felt troubled. Toring told Snyder that he had decided to send his son Jim to Harvard High instead of Royal.

“I felt like I had the wind knocked out of me,” Snyder said. “I saw stars and my knees were weak. My first thought was, ‘This can’t be happening to me.’ ”

Toring called the decision the toughest of his life.

“I’ve bought and sold houses and made all kinds of decisions, but none were harder than this,” he said. “I love Steve Snyder. I would do anything for the Royal program. How could I tell him that I was taking away a kid that he was counting on?”

To say that Jim Toring is the best water polo prospect to come out of Simi Valley understates his talent and only hints at Snyder’s anguish. Toring, a 6-foot-2, 140-pound freshman driver on the Harvard team, might be the best 15-year-old player in the nation.

When he made the national youth training team for players 17 and under last year, he was the youngest player (age 13) ever selected.

“I still can’t believe he’s here,” Harvard Coach Rich Corso said.

Snyder still has trouble believing he is not at Royal. But Toring represents more than a bright young talent to Snyder. His bloodlines are laced with Highlander green and gold. His father is the general manager of the age-group water polo association that Snyder founded in Simi Valley. His brother Rob, in 1984-85, led the Highlanders to two of their nine consecutive Marmonte League titles and currently coaches the age-group teams.

Jim Toring entered that program as an 8-year-old and has traveled with the varsity team to Hawaii where Snyder gave him surfing lessons.

Snyder acted like a doting uncle around Jim, in part because he saw himself in the young athlete. Snyder starred at Reseda High and swam on the Cal State Long Beach water polo team that placed third in the nation in 1971.

Snyder admits that he didn’t take the news of Toring’s defection well. “I sulked for about a week,” he said. But he understood the family’s reasons. The water polo programs at each school are comparable, but the academic program offered at Royal, a public high school in Simi Valley, is no match for the program at one of the area’s most prestigious and expensive prep schools.

Snyder and the Highlanders wished Toring well when school started in September. Devin Hurst, a senior who holds the school single-season and career scoring records, spoke for the team.

“Me and Jimmy are pretty good friends and it hurt to lose such a good player,” he said. “We had looked forward to this year when we would play together. But I wasn’t mad. I wished I had the same opportunity.”

Snyder has made his peace with the Torings too. He watched Toring play in a Harvard match this fall, and Toring still swims at Royal’s home pool with the age-group team. But there has been more this season to trouble Snyder.

Before the first match, Mike Mendoza, who won a varsity letter last season in his first season of water polo, moved back to the Bay Area for family reasons, costing Royal a probable starter.

Two other projected starters left the program when brothers Marten and Ryan Duncan quit the team in September, saying they wanted to concentrate on swimming. Snyder couldn’t blame the swim coach because he is the swim coach.

“They led us to believe that we could count on them,” he said. “I just think it’s wrong in high school to specialize that much.”

A month later, during the team’s participation in a tournament in San Luis Obispo, Royal lost two more players, including a starter, for disciplinary reasons.

“Two of our players got caught by the police trying to buy alcohol,” Snyder said. “That violates my primary rule: ‘If you’re caught with alcohol or drugs, you’re immediately off the team for the rest of the season.’ It hurt us badly, but it’s something we had to do.”

After losing five of the program’s top eight players, Snyder has built another Marmonte League champion around Hurst and a group of players projected for the junior varsity. Hurst has scored 128 goals, shattering the school record he set last year. He scored 112 goals as a junior to break the mark of 110 set by his brother Dain in 1985. Devin Hurst owns the school career record with 312 goals.

Hurst led Royal to its ninth consecutive league title this season and helped extend the school’s league winning streak to 34. He scored five goals in Royal’s 11-6 win Wednesday over Glendale in the first round of the Southern Section 3-A Division playoffs and brought the Highlanders (15-6) face to face with their nemesis--the second round.

In Snyder’s 10 years with the program, the Highlanders have been to the playoffs each year and have yet to win a second-round match. Today’s match on the road against top-seeded El Toro will be Royal’s eighth try at breaking the jinx.

“With all the stuff that has happened to us, wouldn’t it be ironic if this is the year we break the jinx,” Snyder said.

The amusement is back for Snyder, who wondered if this would be his last season as coach. The loss of Toring, along with the other setbacks, forced him to question his role as leader of the program. At 41, he wondered if coaching was still worth the effort.

“One of my first reactions to losing Jimmy was to think, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ ” he said. “It took me a while to remember that this is not for me or about me at all. Jimmy made a decision that was in his best interest, and I wish him all the best. But I’m not in this job for me. I’m in it for the love of the sport and for these guys in the pool.

“I was really down before, but I’m having a blast. I realized that I have a great job. While most guys my age are battling on the freeway, I’m out in the sunshine getting a tan and working with kids who want to be here, and that’s great.”