It’s a New Approach, but the Results Are the Same : High schools: The Palos Verdes girls’ basketball team, noted for its winning ways, turns to transfers to maintain its top billing.

Wendell Yoshida’s style isn’t to roll out the basketballs, say “go to it girls” and find a comfortable seat along the sideline.

The Palos Verdes High girls’ basketball coach has a high degree of personal commitment to the program, and because of his hard work, he has built one of the top programs in the country.

“Wendell is dedicated, so it just oozes out to the players because we know he cares,” said junior Jeffra Gausepohl, one of three transfers on the 1990-91 team.

Besides Gausepohl, the other transfers are junior Kristen Mulligan and senior Nicole Dietel. Mimi McKinney, a talented freshman, moved from San Pedro to attend Palos Verdes.

It is the largest and perhaps best influx of players Yoshida has had in 11 seasons at Palos Verdes.

Mulligan was the second-leading scorer in Orange County last season at Santa Margarita High, Gausepohl is a 6-foot-5 all-district player from Pennsylvania, Dietel is a 6-1 senior with three seasons of varsity experience at Westminster High, and McKinney is a All-American Athletic Union 13-and-under player who would be attending junior high had she not moved into the district.

Yoshida said the new players give him a deeper, more talented, quicker and taller lineup than ever before. But despite a 9-1 start, he said the 1990-91 team lacks experience.

“They are like a bunch of little puppies,” he said. “You can’t turn your back on them or they’re into something.”

Yoshida believes the new players were initially attracted to Palos Verdes by the Sea Kings’ winning tradition, but ultimately came because of other reasons.

“I don’t think it is so much of being a part of a winning program as it is other things,” Yoshida said. “Because there are a lot of winning programs.”

Winning may be exactly why Yoshida receives calls every year from players who want to attend Palos Verdes, but to say the new players moved in only to play basketball is unfair.

Palos Verdes is a desirable, if not exclusive, area in which to reside. And it has an excellent school. Yoshida said 97% of the school’s graduates go on to college.

However, basketball is probably the biggest factor in helping the players choose Palos Verdes.

Can you blame them? Palos Verdes’ success is reaching legendary status. The Sea Kings’ legacy begins with:

A league winning streak of 47 games and four consecutive titles;

Four consecutive trips to the playoffs, where they have qualified for no worse than the Southern Section quarterfinals. They won the 3-A Division title in 1988;

Southern California Division II regional champion and state runner-up in 1988;

A junior varsity team that has compiled a 41-3 record the past two seasons.

It does not come as a surprise to find Palos Verdes at the top of the 3-AA rankings this season. The Sea Kings were ranked sixth in The Times’ Southern California preseason poll. At least one national preseason magazine, Street & Smith, ranked them as high as 13th in the country.

And it does not come as a surprise to find Palos Verdes at the top again this season, but how Yoshida has strengthened the 1990-91 team--with transfers--is unusual.

Palos Verdes emerged as a girls’ basketball power in the late 1980s behind 6-foot-5 twins Heather and Heidi Burge, who now play for the University of Virginia. The Burges moved from Redondo Beach to Palos Verdes Estates before starting high school, but the move was not for basketball.

Other players who have helped put Palos Verdes’ program on the map include Lisa Humphreys and Mary Maloney, both of whom played on last year’s team. Humphreys’ family moved from Temple City to Palos Verdes before Lisa’s junior year. She now plays for Loyola Marymount. Maloney’s family moved from Terminal Island, where her father worked for the Coast Guard, Yoshida said.

“These players (in the past) have built the program and given us the reputation that has attracted these (new) kids in,” Yoshida said.

The Sea Kings returned five players off last season’s squad, including a solid front line of Monique Morehouse, a 6-3 junior, and Kim Anthony, a 6-1 senior. Guards Misty Folsom, Raquel Alotis and Kaaren Iverson also returned.

But the attention early has shifted to the new players.

And, naturally, there are questions about how Yoshida added the transfers.

“I can say . . . that (Yoshida) made no overtures to us,” said Dennis Mulligan, Kristen’s father. “We made all the contact from the beginning.”

Said Vicki Gausepohl, Jeffra’s mother: “Jeffra is just a tall girl who likes basketball. Wendell (Yoshida) was very good about it. He was not aggressive and handled it very smoothly.”

But it still hasn’t kept Yoshida from becoming the butt of good-natured ribbing from other coaches. In fact, the game program from Brea-Olinda High, which defeated the Sea Kings in the Southern California Division III final last season, jokes that Yoshida runs “the University of California-Palos Verdes.”

“I never compete for a kid,” Yoshida said. “I just show her what we have and let the kid decide.

“We went through all the proper channels. I didn’t contact any of them to play basketball. In fact, if a player contacts me, I tell them to call the principal or athletic director. I didn’t have anything to do with their actual moving to Palos Verdes.”

Yoshida understands the pressures and expectations on a family making a move to Palos Verdes.

“It’s amazing that people would go to that length,” he said. “It sure puts pressure on me to make them the best basketball player they can be.”

But in the case of the Gausepohls, it was a matter of her father, Jeff, getting transferred to the West Coast by the company he works for.

“We are sacrificing a lot to live here,” Vicki Gausepohl said. “It is stretching us, but if it works for (Jeffra then) that’s all that counts.”

The Gausepohls are renting now, which came as a shock to them because they had owned property in Pennsylvania.

“We have been in the real estate market for 20 years,” Vicki Gausepohl said. “Now we can’t afford it here in Palos Verdes. Prices are three times higher in Palos Verdes.”

For the Mulligans, the move meant selling their house in Rancho Santa Margarita and renting a house in Palos Verdes for $600 more a month than what their house payment was before they moved. That is partly the reason Kristen’s mother, Mary, who worked part-time before, had to return to full-time work.

Vicki Gausepohl said she realizes the family is catering to their daughter.

“Yes we are spoiling her, but too much, no,” she said. “We only have one (child). What else are we going to do? This is an opportunity afforded my daughter that I didn’t have.”

And with the new players, it gives Palos Verdes the opportunity to maintain the quality of program it has established.