Torrey Pines Reaches a State of Heightened Expectations : Volleyball: Falcons are focused on improving last season’s finish and winning Division II championship.

There might be life outside of volleyball, but Torrey Pines won’t discover it until after the playoffs.

Talk about one-dimensional. Even close friends of Torrey Pines girls’ volleyball players tire of the shop talk.

“We’ll be sitting together, talking about volleyball,” senior setter Sarah McCandless said with a laugh. “Some of our friends get sick of it.”

All for a good cause. If the Falcons have their way, their focus will remain through Dec. 7, when the regional finalists for Southern and Northern California meet in the Division II finals at Cal State Fullerton.

Winning a state championship has been the goal of this Torrey Pines team from the start of the season, a carry-over from last year’s inspiration when the Falcons defeated Poway and won the San Diego Section, something no other Torrey Pines team had done.

With seven returning seniors, five of them starters, going the one step further didn’t seem far-fetched.

“We had beaten Poway, won CIF and made it to the semis of the state tournament,” McCandless said. “Those were things we hadn’t been able to obtain before. We were only one game away from a state final.”

But Coach Jim Harrah has had to temper his team’s enthusiasm. Overlook the present and you can forget about the future, he stressed at more than one hastily called meeting.

“A month ago, we were looking past CIF to state,” he said. “To win league you have to play hard, to win CIF you have to play especially hard. You can’t take those things for granted.

“In the end, CIF is the sweetest, the most realistic (goal), because you get to state and everyone’s playing at such a high level. Anything can happen.”

To make a state final appearance a reality, third-seeded Torrey Pines (26-5) has to win two more rounds, the first against second-seeded La Habra on Saturday night. But the Falcons aren’t without outside supporters.

Mt. Carmel Coach Barb Charlebois said a victory for Torrey Pines is a smaller victory for any school that has played the Falcons.

“It will be neat to see them go to the final,” Charlebois said. “They’ve never been pushed that fifth game by a San Diego team, and that’s a real credit to their program. But it hasn’t come by accident. They’ve worked hard. The rest of us have a ways to go to reach their level.”

Charlebois has a three-point theory as to why Torrey Pines is on a level few county schools--Poway is one--can rival.

“One of the things that puts them over is they have so many kids playing club ball year round,” she said.

True. A staggering 14 of Harrah’s 15 players are members of the San Diego Volleyball Club. Brett Hensel, Kathy Oleksow, Kami Schmedding, Laura Buell, Kim Andrews and McCandless, five of whom are current starters, played on a 16-year-old SDVC team that took fourth in the Junior Olympics two years ago. Last year, as 17-year-olds, they finished 24th overall at a prestigious tournament at UC Davis.

Being together so long has helped from a personality standpoint as much as a playing one, according to McCandless.

“It’s really helped with knowing which buttons to push and which ones not to push, what to say and what not to say,” she said.

The second part of Charlebois’ theory is longevity, that the staying power of the coaching staff has added stability to Torrey Pines’ program, and team members have responded to that.

“That kind of consistency is hard to come by,” Charlebois’ said. “They have a dedicated head coach that expects excellence from his girls.”

Harrah has been coaching at Torrey Pines for seven years, assistant Andy Harrah has helped his brother the past four years. Junior varsity coach Dan Lyman has been around more than a decade.

Finally, traveling out of San Diego has helped close the once wide talent gap that separated Los Angeles and Orange counties from San Diego teams.

“Torrey Pines and Poway set that process in motion,” Charlebois said. “Even if they didn’t want to, they improved. And it has filtered down. All those things contribute to a good program.”

Harrah is banking on the lessons learned from Torrey Pines’ extensive tournament play to carry it through its tough upcoming matches.

“That’s one of the reasons we went to Chicago,” Harrah said of the Falcons’ trip to a national tournament early in the season. “When you’re playing away matches in San Diego, you see I-5 and there’s still a reference point. But when you’re in a gym that far away, surrounded by corn fields, you learn from that. The girls are able to block out a lot.”

Said McCandless: “People see us and say we don’t get excited or emotional enough, but we know when to turn it on and off. It’s something we’ve worked on.”

It was a tough question to ask McCandless, but she fielded it like the leader Harrah said she is on the court. If there’s no state title, is the season a waste?

“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said. “Even though our goal is to win, there are certain steps you have to take to get there. Even times we’ve lost, we knew we played our best. Sometimes teams are just going to play better than you. So no, it wouldn’t be a waste.”

You get the feeling she might not have to find out.