Harmony Puts USD’s Team in Tune : Tennis: Coach Stephens has Toreras’ program on the upswing.

On her recruiting visit to the University of San Diego, Julie McKeon, one of the top-ranked junior tennis players in the nation, wanted to make a good first impression on her future teammates. Instead, she acted like a nervous teen-ager on a first date.

“I hardly said two words the whole trip,” McKeon said. “All of the girls were just so wild and funny. And I was just overwhelmed, I guess. I thought, ‘Oh, great. They probably think I’m a weirdo or something.’ ”

But even with her silent routine, McKeon still received enough votes to be accepted as a member of the team.

Yes, votes.

The practice of players voting on their future teammates is a philosophy USD Coach Sherri Stephens picked up from Arizona basketball Coach Lute Olson while she was an assistant in Tucson.

“The players pretty much pick the team,” Stephens said. “Once I saw Lute Olson turn around a team that had won only one game into a winner, I was sold on the fact that talent is not everything.”

That theory is just one of the things that made Stephens’ program attractive to McKeon, Kara Brady and Laura Richards.

The three freshmen, all ranked among the top 35 juniors in the nation last year, had enticing offers from schools with more tennis tradition than USD. But they chose USD, which until two years ago never qualified for the NCAA tournament in women’s tennis.

The signings gave Stephens her best recruiting class ever. She had landed nationally ranked players before, but never three in the same year.

“For me to get my top three choices was unbelievable,” Stephens said.

What made it more unbelievable was that Stephens was able to recruit them from different parts of the country. McKeon came from Northbrook, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, Brady from Lawrence, Kan., and Richards from Vista. Finally, the word was getting out that USD’s program is on the rise.

The freshman have taken their lumps this year playing Nos. 3 through 5 in singles. McKeon is 5-7 at No. 3, Richards 8-8 at No. 4 and Brady 6-7 at No. 5.

But many of their losses have come in three-set matches, and most of their opponents have been playing for top-20 teams. Six of USD’s seven dual-meet losses have been to teams ranked in the top 16. Three of its six victories have come against top-20 teams.

The Toreras’ credentials have been good enough to rank them 15th nationally.

But 15th is not what Stephens or the team has in mind for this year.

With the three freshmen, senior Tonya Fuller, ranked 11th in singles, and junior Tuck Kacharoen (24th), USD has loftier goals--such as reaching the NCAA quarterfinals and receiving a top-10 ranking for the first time in school history.

But until Stephens began to hold her own on the recruiting trail, such talk was never heard at Alcala Park.

Since arriving at USD seven years ago, Stephens has always followed the same principles, which she said are almost identical to Lute Olson’s . . .

* Recruit the personality and not the player.

* Recruit on potential as well as talent.

* Make sure the player’s personality meshes with the rest of the team.

Stephens had been able to attract a player who fit the mold, but rarely more than one at a time because of her previous scholarship allotment of 4 1/2. She was competing against universities that could give eight full scholarships.

“I think we’ve got to be the only school in the top 20 that doesn’t have eight scholarships to give,” Stephens said.

Many times, Stephens could sell a recruit on the high academic standards, small classes and location of USD, but she couldn’t offer her a full ride.

“We couldn’t seem to get a penny,” Stephens said. “I think we were ahead of our time. I don’t think people realized what we were doing. Financially, I could not keep doing it.”

So last year, USD athletic director Tom Iannacone gave 1 1/2 more scholarships to Stephens, pushing her total to six.

Ultimately, the extra scholarships enabled Stephens to recruit McKeon, Richards and Brady. Stephens acknowledges she probably would have landed only one of them if things hadn’t changed.

Brady, also recruited by UC Santa Barbara, Clemson, Indiana and Kansas, said she would not have come to USD without a full ride.

“It’s sad, but it is a factor,” Brady said. “My parents put a lot of money in me (throughout junior tennis). I felt like I owed it to them to get a full ride.”

But money wasn’t the only lure for Brady.

“I just liked girls on the team, and I really liked Sherri and all of her ideas,” Brady said. “I liked the way Sherri stressed closeness on the team.”

Richards said she had “one foot in the door at Pepperdine” before she took her trip to USD.

“I never realized how beautiful it was here,” said Richards, San Diego’s top-ranked player in the girls’ 18s last year. “I also never really knew how good USD was.”

McKeon was swayed by the smallness of USD, with its undergraduate enrollment of under 4,000.

“Everyone seems to know each other here,” McKeon said. “Cal and Texas were both so huge. I really wanted to go to a small school with strong academics.”

But while USD’s strong academic reputation has helped lured some recruits, Stephens said it hasn’t always created the best atmosphere for athletics.

“They place so much emphasis on academics, and that’s good, but I’m not sure they realize what level we’re playing at,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if people around here know how good we are.”

Maybe McKeon, Brady and Richards will make people take notice.