Morningside Rolling Again : Prep basketball: The Lady Monarchs have put early season losses behind them. Now 24-3, they are gunning for another state championship.

After two months and more than 20 victories, Lisa Leslie and the Morningside High School girls basketball team can finally see the mountaintop again.

It’s been a long trip back from December, when Morningside, then ranked by USA Today as the No. 1 girls team in the country, suffered three early losses and dropped from the national spotlight.

“Sometimes losing is what you need,” said the 6-foot-5 Leslie, one of the nation’s premier players and the centerpiece of Morningside’s attack.

“We learned early in the season how it feels to lose. It reminded us to never want to experience that feeling again.”

Morningside (24-3), one of the country’s most famous teams--or infamous, depending on your perspective--is back in a winning groove. The Lady Monarchs are the top-seeded team in the Southern Section 5-AA Division playoffs and are ranked first in the state in Division I.

And the Lady Monarchs, who won the state championship last season with a 32-1 record, are excited about winning again.

So much so that Leslie forgot to pack her jersey before Morningside took the court against Leuzinger in the first round of the playoffs Wednesday night.

She retrieved the jersey from her sister’s car almost three minutes into the game, then came off the bench to spark Morningside to an 89-49 victory with 27 points, 11 rebounds and six steals.

Saturday night, Morningside’s second-round match-up will be against visiting Antelope Valley.

“I don’t think anyone can beat us now,” said Janet Davis, the 6-4 sophomore forward who teams with Leslie on the state’s most formidable front line. “I have a strong feeling that we will take the state championship again.”

Morningside is clearly the class of the 5-AA. The best team in the division, other than the Lady Monarchs, is San Gabriel Valley League champion Lynwood (21-1), whose only loss came in the semifinals of the Morningside Tournament to Washington.

Morningside beat Washington in the final.

“We’re pretty close to our peak right now, offensively and defensively,” Morningside Coach Frank Scott said. “We’re starting to percolate.”

What worries 5-AA rivals is what happens when Morningside begins to boil. The Lady Monarchs cruised undefeated through the 14-game Ocean League schedule. The closest decision was a 30-point victory over West Torrance.

At the center of the story, of course, is Leslie. She scored 101 points in the first half of a league game last week against South Torrance to boost her scoring average to 27 points per game.

Leslie also averages 15 rebounds and seven blocked shots a game. Davis, Leslie’s front-court mate, is averaging 10 points, 10 rebounds and four blocks. Guard Bridget Williams (10 points per game), point guard Princess Murray and forwards Denesha Carnell and Sherrell Young fill in the gaps on offense.

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” Scott said. “We’ve started meshing the pieces together. You know, this girl does this better on offense, that girl does that better on defense.”

It wasn’t always that easy. Scott had to scramble to put together his starting lineups in the preseason, when Morningside was slowed by injuries to Davis, Williams and Murray during tournament time.

Still, in November and early December, Scott could open the sports section of USA Today and find his team heading the nation’s Top 25.

“If they had asked me, I would have begged them: Please don’t rank us up there,’ ” Scott said. “At that point, we were ranked No. 1. So we went along for the ride.”

Even Leslie admitted to a few doubts. “When we were ranked at the top, I wished we could have rather been No. 10 and then climbed our way up,” she said.

Morningside’s journey hit its first pothole in the final of the Santa Barbara Tournament of Champions. After Leslie fouled out, Morningside absorbed a seven-point loss to Brea-Olinda, the top-ranked team in the 3-AA Division.

Later in December, the Lady Monarchs traveled to Shelbyville, Tenn., for the Best in the U.S. Tournament--an eight-team affair reserved for 1989 state champions and runners-up.

Slowed by injuries, Morningside lost, 72-43, to Cannon County of Tennessee in the semifinals. Then in the third-place game, the Lady Monarchs were bounced, 67-64, by South Pike of Mississippi.

As a result, Morningside fell from USA Today’s top 25, while Brea-Olinda and Washington of Los Angeles moved in.

“That stung,” Davis said. “That really hurt us, to be knocked out of the rankings. But we came back and we practiced hard and told ourselves we weren’t going to lose any more games.”

They haven’t.

“When we did lose, we were at our weakest,” Leslie said. “But we knew what kind of team we had all along. We were building up, and we’re ready now.”

Still, even in success, Morningside hasn’t been able to avoid its share of notoriety, especially after Leslie poured in 101 points in a half against an outmanned and outgunned South Torrance team.

Scott turned Leslie loose as part of a school tradition--each year he likes to let one senior “shine” in her final regular-season game.

In this case, Scott wanted to give Leslie a shot at the national scoring record of 105 set by Riverside Poly’s Cheryl Miller in 1982.

Leslie lost her chance of breaking the record when South Torrance Coach Gil Ramirez pulled his team--down to four players because of fouls and injuries--off the court before the second half.

Since then, criticism has fallen on both coaches--on Ramirez for violating Southern Section codes of sportsmanship, and on Scott for running up the score.

Scott admitted the mistake but said he still really can’t see what all the fuss was about.

“I don’t think we’ll be trying that ever again,” he said. “But it amazes me that it became such a monumental issue. It was never my intention to cause hurt to anyone or to draw criticism onto our school. I never thought it would hurt anybody that bad.”

Scott, who doubles as Morningside’s baseball coach, has been on the losing end of his share of blowouts on the diamond.

“It’s like a double-edged sword,” Scott said. “Our baseball team is usually not very good, and we lose games by scores like 16-0 and 25-3. Sometimes I’ve wished that other coaches would call off the dogs. But we don’t ever walk off the field.”

Leslie, the Dial Award winner as the nation’s top high school female athlete, said she will choose between USC, Notre Dame and Cal State Long Beach when she signs her national letter of intent in April.

But for now, she’d rather forget the record and the controversy, just as she shrugged aside the pain of those early losses.

“It’ll pass in time,” she said. “It’s time to move on.”