Torrance Soccer Team Hits Right Chord : High schools: Defense has been the key to Tartars’ success. The girls’ team is 20-1-1 and has outscored opponents, 95-8.

Occasionally, right in the middle of a game, Jenny Halladay will sing a song.

The goalie for the Torrance High girls’ soccer team will let loose with the lyrics from a Guns n’ Roses song.

Halladay sings because she gets bored. Opponents average less than four shots a game against the Tartars, about one every 18 minutes.

“I’d really like to see the ball sometimes,” Halladay said. “I don’t want to just stand there. Sometimes, I think of songs. Just sometimes.”

Torrance is 20-1-1 and has outscored opponents, 95-8. No CIF 3-A Division team has allowed fewer goals than the Tartars, who have 17 victories by shutout.

Top-ranked Torrance is the only 3-A team which has not allowed a goal in league play, having clinched the Pioneer League title with a 5-0 record heading into its final regular-season game at 3 p.m. today at West Torrance. The Tartars will be the favorite when the playoffs start Feb. 15.

Torrance has won 13 games by four or more goals. Blowouts have become common enough for Coach John Jackson to have the team work on specific plays or directions during games, and to notice when the girls’ concentration slacks off.

“They fall into a trap where it’s too easy,” Jackson said. “And then sometimes they’ll come up against a hard team that they haven’t seen, it takes them a while to decide, ‘Oh shoot, we have to try and play.’ ”

Jackson, an NCAA soccer referee who works about 40 games a year, emphasizes short passes, controlling head balls, keeping the ball in the offensive end and making sure his players take frequent shots on goal. Since becoming coach three years ago, the Tartars are 54-7-6.

Torrance lost seven players from last year’s team, which went 17-3-4, won the Pioneer League title and lost to Mission Viejo, 1-0, in the second round of the playoffs.

But Jackson had five all-league players returning. Four of them--sophomore goalie Halladay, junior midfielder Jessica Reifer, junior forward Gwen Nakashima and sophomore forward Jenny Yokoyama--have or will play for an all-star select team from Southern California. In fact, all but three members of the team have club experience, and the team worked together this summer on running and conditioning.

The girls say that last year’s loss to Mission Viejo motivates them and helps them focus on the upcoming playoffs.

“We outshot them by a lot,” Reifer said. “We dominated, but died in the second half a little. They got a lucky goal. It haunts us. It makes us play really hard this year. We’d like to play them again.”

Halladay said: “That would be our dream. To play them in the finals.”

This season, Torrance’s only loss was against El Dorado, 1-0, on a penalty kick in the final minute.

Reifer and junior forward Nakashima lead the team in scoring, having accounted for nearly half of the team’s goals.

Although Torrance starts only one senior, coaches from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, Washington State, Westmont, Cal State Dominguez Hills and El Camino College have stopped by Tartar practices and games.

And these recruiters get a show. A singing goalie is not the only oddity on this team. They have gimmicks galore.

While doing laps before games, members of the team jump up and do a running wave. They also do synchronized half turns while running laps, and are constantly clapping and yelling at one another. Every now and then, they close practice with a game of Nerf football.

“We do lots of things to get really psyched up,” said Monique Camou, the team’s only starting senior. “The whole team gets along really well. We just like to joke around. But we also take practice seriously and try to do the best we can out here.”

Sophomore forward Lisa Liebenau said: “I’ve never been on a team that I’ve had this much fun with in my life. We’re so together. We’ve been together, like, forever. And when we get on the field, we can beat anyone.”

Not everyone is overjoyed with the large margins of victory. Rolling Hills has played the Tartars twice, losing 4-0 in the first week of the season, and more recently, 9-0. Rich Crail, the Rolling Hills coach, thinks that Torrance tried to run up the score on his young team.

“I think they are a very fine team,” Crail said. “The one thing I have not been happy about . . . is that in the first week we played them and they beat us, 4-0, with five or 10 minutes left in the game they are up four and their coach is yelling at them to score more goals.

“One week ago they were beating us, 5-0, at halftime. He came out in the second half with the same starting lineup. He made late lineup changes, but in the last minutes he’s still telling his kids to shoot. I think they are an excellent team. They are very tough and have an excellent midfielder in Reifer. The only thing that upset me is that they seem to have wanted to run the score.”

Torrance’s players, meanwhile, think the opposite.

“A couple of times, like against Rolling Hills or Chadwick, we’ll have one person just set to shoot or something, because coach doesn’t want us to win 20-0 against then,” Liebenau said.

“Sometimes, coach will make it harder for us. Like, we’ll have two passes and then we’ll have to shoot or something. Or he’ll say, ‘Monique, you’re the only one who can shoot, and nobody else can shoot.’ ”

Reifer said: “We just go out there and play the game, and if we score a lot, that’s good. But it seems we just try to go out and do the best we can as a team and the goals will just come.”

The team takes pride in its statistics. The players are quick to correct you about their number of shutouts. They like being number one, and enjoy the fact that other teams may point to them.

“Most teams we go against, they all want to knock us off, and whether they’ve been having a crummy season, or a good season, everybody’s up for us,” Jackson said. “Everybody will play us tough, and we’ll see them play against someone else and they’ll look terrible, and you’ll go, ‘Geez. They did not play like that against us.’ ”

Halladay said: “We don’t go in cocky, but we know that if we are down we will come back. Like, against Santa Monica we were losing 3-0 and came back to win, 4-3. Or against Palos Verdes. We were losing 2-0 and came back to win, 4-2. Other teams don’t do stuff like that.”

“We’re so confident in ourselves it’s unbelievable.”