Untiring Effort, Unequaled spirit, Unbeaten Record : Volleyball: Helix takes a 31-match winning streak into tonight’s the section title challenge. Already, the Highlanders possess the confidence of champions.

Michael Welch kicked back on the grass outside the Helix High gymnasium while his girls’ volleyball team went through a light workout Tuesday afternoon in preparation for a San Diego Section Division II semifinal match that evening.

The opponent would be Monte Vista, a fierce league rival that had twice given the Highlanders a scare during the regular season. This would be the most important match of the season. A victory would send Helix to its first section title game.

Welch, a clean-cut 26-year-old, was asked to consider the possibility that his Highlanders might lose. Wild laughter was ringing through the open double doors. Welch smiled.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We won’t lose.”

Welch wasn’t being brash. He was supremely confident, extremely nonchalant. And why not? His team was 30-0.

In 1987, Welch inherited a team that was 0-16 the previous season. Nine months ago, the players decided 1990 would be the year Helix would win its first section championship. And Tuesday, Helix rescued itself from the clutches of defeat, trailing 2-1 in games, and defeated Monte Vista again, 10-15, 15-6, 2-15, 15-2, 15-10, to advance to today’s 5 p.m. final against Torrey Pines (24-2) at Mira Mesa High.

The Highlanders defeated Torrey Pines, 15-9, 13-15, 15-13, Sept. 15 to capture the championship of the Helix Invitational. Although Torrey Pines remains ranked No. 3 in the state and Helix is unranked, no other Division 3-A team in county history has won 31 games in a row. Helix’s 29 consecutive home victories are also a 3-A record.

The Highlanders’ all-senior lineup is 85-8 over the past three seasons. In 1988, Helix won its first of three Grossmont 3-A League championships. Times have changed at a school where, Welch said, volleyball was considered nothing more than “a social sport,” and the team had four different coaches in four years.

The team that once laughed when it lost now laughs only when it wins, which is all the time. After all, no Bill Walton basketball team at Helix was ever 31-0.

“The desire of these girls is very high,” Welch said. “It’s not that they’re not afraid of losing, it’s just that they want to win and they’re going to do whatever it takes.”

They’ve won with startling ease. Twenty-two of their victories have come in straight games. But they’ve come frightenly close to losing. There was the scare Halloween night, when Granite Hills had match point in the fourth game. Then there was Tuesday’s semifinal, a two-hour marathon played in front of the relentless screams of a packed crowd in the Serra High gym.

The streak, as well as a season of hopes and dreams, was all but over. Helix went into the tank in its 15-2 loss in game three, unable to serve, receive or finish any ball. The team was emotionally frazzled.

But Welch, unfazed, gathered his girls and said “all we need is two more games.” Helix scored the first point of game four by saving a ball that ricocheted wildly off a ceiling cross beam.

And so started the team’s greatest comeback.

“This was one of the greatest displays of heart I’ve seen,” said Karrie Downey, Helix’s heavily recruited middle blocker. “Nothing was there (in the third game). It was zero. We couldn’t find a groove.”

There are two obvious reasons for the miraculous turnaround in the Highlanders and their uncanny success this season: Welch and Downey.

When Welch--who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and played volleyball at L.A. Pierce College and Cal State Chico--interviewed for the Helix job, administrators made him promise he would stay for more than a year. He promised that and much more.

Welch and his assistant, Thad Trent, 23, brought a youthful exuberance, putting together a team program that resembles a press guide and starting a newsletter this season. He leaves volleyball updates on his telephone answering machine. He coordinated a fund-raising efforts to send his team to an August tournament in Hawaii.

He’s also brought the poise and determination of a taskmaster. During practices, Welch puts his starters in impossible-to-win circumstances, stacking the opposition, playing against them himself and making them score three times to earn a point. This, he says, takes the anxiety out of real matches.

“You see them right now,” he said before Tuesday’s match. “It’s three hours before the semifinal match and they’re so relaxed, it’s like they’re getting ready to go to the beach.”

The girls’ challenge to win the section title was the result of a goal-setting session Welch held with the players and parents in February.

“The players themselves decided,” he said. “If I tell them what they want--if I say, ‘Hey girls, you want to win CIF?’--it doesn’t mean that much. Now I remind them, ‘This is what you decided you want. How are you going to get there?’

“I don’t coach by telling them. I coach by asking them questions. ‘What did you do wrong? How can you improve on that?’ So by game time, they feel comfortable with their own decisions.”

Welch made his boldest move late in the season when he put the team through a second conditioning program, the type normally set aside for the preseason. The long workouts, filled with intense speed drills, left the players gasping down the stretch. Now, he says, the team is physically peaking.

But Welch’s best ploy may have come in Hawaii, when he took a team separated by cliques and mixed the girls in different hotel rooms.

Said Welch, “Now people I thought would never be friends are best friends.”

Welch has never been one to put up with nonsense, and he had to make that point immediately when he took the team in 1987. After a winless 1986, Helix finished 9-13.

“By the time I got here, (the program) had hit rock bottom,” he said. “After a loss, they’d all be laughing. I had to tell them, ‘It’s not OK to lose. You just humiliated yourselves.’ ”

In 1988, Helix jumped to 26-5 and its first league title. In 1989, the Highlanders finished 29-3, falling to Torrey Pines, ranked 15th in the country, in the section semifinals.

But Welch would be hard-pressed to figure what Helix’s fortunes would be without Downey, whom he calls the top college prospect in the county. The 5-foot-10 senior is a remarkable athlete, with a vertical leap near 31 inches, lightning quickness and breathtaking reflexes at the net. In four years, three as a starter, she has 1,109 kills, 277 blocks for points and 208 service aces. Her season totals thus far are 411, 104 and 79.

“I hate stats,” Downey said after her best match ever Tuesday. She finished with 27 kills and seven blocks and dominated the most important night in the program’s history.

“There are times that she is the most unbelievable player I’ve ever seen,” Welch said. “If she gets this burning desire in her, forget it. Turn out the lights, shut the door and leave.”

Yet, Downey and others must face the realization that Torrey Pines could turn out the lights on Helix’s fairy tale season tonight. All great teams lose sometime.

“If you look at our team compared to Torrey Pines, man-for-man we’re not at their level at all,” Downey said. “We may not have the strongest hitters in the county and we may not have best defensive players, but we have a lot of heart. When times get tough, we pull together. We’re a comeback team.

“I love this team.”