In Brea, Hoopla Is Over Girls’ Basketball

Ten years ago, they used to laugh at Mark Trakh for even suggesting the possibility.

Packed gymnasiums? For a high school girls’ basketball game? Never in a million years, they said with a snicker. Girls were slow, weak and uncoordinated. Who would come to watch that?

But the skeptics could not have been more wrong.

Since Trakh, the Brea-Olinda High School Ladycats have become the top attraction in this tightknit community of 34,000. From City Hall to the Brea Mall, people here reel with Ladycat fever. And this weekend, as many as 1,000 fans are expected to make the trip to Oakland when Brea plays in its third consecutive California Interscholastic Federation state championship game. The Ladycats will meet Hayward Moreau at 1:15 p.m. Saturday in the Division II final at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.

The turnout is indicative of the tremendous community support that buoys the girls’ team here--which has a record that few teams in the state, or even the nation, can match.

Before Trakh, the Brea girls had won only four of 53 games over four seasons. With Trakh--and with a system that develops players beginning in elementary school--Brea is 285-37. This year was said to be a rebuilding year. The Ladycats are 32-1.

Those who were around when Trakh first came to town for the 1980-81 season look back with wonder, both at the success of the program and at the community that has helped make it happen.

“I did not think--nor did anyone, in my opinion, think--that a little goofy school like Brea would ever be in a state championship game three years in a row,” said Rick Jones, a Brea history teacher who was an assistant coach for the boys’ basketball team when Trakh arrived.

“And I think anyone who would have said it could happen would have been a little goofy--and that includes my good friend Mark Trakh.”

Jones is right. No one believed Brea would be in a state championship, or any championship for that matter.

In the first week of practice, Trakh saw a team that had very little basketball knowledge. Players, some wearing bathing suits to practice, confused offense with defense. They’d dribble with two hands--or sometimes forget to dribble altogether. They shot at the wrong basket.

And that was the varsity. The junior varsity was so bad, Trakh promised to take the players out for ice cream if they scored 10 points or more in a game, which didn’t happen often. It’s no wonder the crowds were paper-thin.

“The gym would be so empty during games,” Trakh said. “When I’d say something to the girls during timeouts, my voice would go boom-boom-boom-boom, echoing off the four walls.”

Trakh began passing out flyers about his team, talking to faculty and students, doing anything to drum up support. He coined the name Ladycats, he said, to give the team its own identity.

“The first rule of marketing is if a product doesn’t work, change the name,” said Trakh, who majored in journalism at Cal State Long Beach.

But the team was a tough sell, even to the players’ parents. Former Brea Principal Jean Sullivan, an assistant principal when Trakh took over, went with Trakh to a few player-parent meetings.

“The parents were sort of puzzled by what we were trying to start,” said Sullivan, who retired last year. “It was like, ‘But these are just girls.’ It was a while before they could start to see we were serious.”

Trakh was that way from the beginning. He’d work the players so hard during practice that they’d often go outside the gym during water breaks to kick a soda machine, pretending it was him. Either that, or they’d go home in tears.

Da Houl was the first star girls’ player at Brea. She said most of her teammates had a tough time handling Trakh’s wild-eyed intensity, but they stayed with it because they believed in what he was trying to do.

“He’d scream and yell, but he got our attention and we worked hard,” said Houl, now Brea’s junior varsity coach. “It was like a few of us would look at each other and say, ‘Hey, something’s happening here.’ ”

It didn’t happen fast. In Trakh’s first season, a game against Gahr--a high-powered program in Cerritos--resulted in a 130-30 loss.

“To lose by 100, it was . . . total humiliation,” Houl said. “You can’t really describe it. But it was also a big turning point for us. We never wanted that to happen again, so we started working even harder.”

When Trakh, who had been an assistant boys’ basketball coach at Western High School in Anaheim the previous two years, came to Brea, he quickly developed a reputation as a brash, aggressive taskmaster. At practice, Trakh expected 100% concentration. He demanded total effort. He screamed a lot. But his players played their hearts out.

His standards are high, whether in action or in appearance--”Tuck your shirts in! Tuck your shirts in!” he shouted at practice this week. But he is as prepared as he is intense. Trakh does extensive scouting reports. The Ladycats memorize opponents’ offensive and defensive tendencies and practice against each other wearing the opposition’s jersey numbers.

He is image-conscious, especially with the media. When told that a few area coaches are jealous of his program, he asks, “Do they really say that? Really? Are they kidding? C’mon, tell me. . . .”

But mostly he is a basketball perfectionist who knows how to get the most of his players. Said Jodi Kleber, a Brea standout from 1982-85: “He helped me grow as a person. I was a shy little kid when I started, but then I became assertive.”

And as his players grew, so did Brea’s success. But Trakh doesn’t get all the credit.

High school sports programs tend to thrive when lower-level schools that feed into them have strong athletic programs. This has been a key for Brea.

The Brea Polcats is an all-star traveling club team made up of girls from Brea Junior High. The team was started by Brea Junior High teacher Jon Joslin and Lt. Bill Lentini of the Brea Police Department.

The team is sponsored by the Police Department, hence the name. In 11 years, the Polcats have a 158-18 record playing club competition throughout Southern California. Last year, the team entered a summer league tournament usually reserved for high school junior varsity teams and finished second . . . losing only to the Brea High JV.

In addition, the Police Department sponsors a yearly tournament for fifth- and sixth-grade girls and boys each spring. More than 500 people came to watch the action last year, Lentini said.

The bottom line is that children in Brea grow up in a competitive basketball environment, making the transition to high school basketball much easier. Love for the sport--and a relentless work ethic--is instilled at a young age.

Seventy-year-old Norma Wanless has lived in Brea for 32 years and is a big Ladycat fan, even though she has never had a relative who played on the team. When Brea suffered its only loss this season, to Christ the King of New York City, Wanless took the loss to heart.

“I almost cried,” Wanless said. “I thought, ‘Oh, those poor, poor girls.’ I just didn’t want them to lose. But that’s how life is, you can’t always win.”

Brea’s small-town atmosphere is evident in its fan following. When the girls’ gym burned down three years ago, some residents gathered in the night air and wept. At home games, with the gym usually packed to capacity, fans rush onto the court for hugs and handshakes after the final buzzer.

Perhaps the most devoted Brea fan was Dyer Bennett, who died this year at 83. Bennett went to practices, took the Ladycats to dinner and talked about sports from his corner booth at Robert’s Cafe. At his funeral, flowers in the school colors (gold and green) were used to adorn his coffin.

He was buried with a Brea letterman’s jacket.

Playoff VETERAN:Brea’s Jody Anton makes her third trip to the state final. C12