Gausepohl Truth: Foes Must Heed Peninsula Standout : In Two Seasons, Senior Has Helped Lead Her Teams to a State Championship and the Nation’s No. 1 Ranking

As a 6-foot-5 teen-age girl, Jeffra Gausepohl is used to attracting stares. She can sense heads turning the minute she walks into a public place, such as a shopping mall.

“There will be a group of guys, my age, and they’ll send out the tallest one to walk five feet past me, turn around and walk back, just to see how tall I am,” she said. “It’s so obvious. Sometimes I’ll put my arm on the guy’s shoulder and say, ‘Look, I’m 6-foot-5, I play basketball for Peninsula High School. Come see one of our games.’ ”

Those who take Gausepohl up on her invitation will most likely see another side to the 17-year-old senior.

Friendly and relaxed off the court, Gausepohl is strictly business when it comes to basketball.

“She is a little more serious about things than her senior teammates,” Peninsula Coach Wendell Yoshida said. “Some of them kind of joke around. Jeffra is more serious. She’s not the type to pull someone’s shorts down.”

Since her arrival at Palos Verdes High in the summer of 1990, before her junior year, Gausepohl’s determination and strong post play have helped her teams to a 53-2 record, a state championship and the nation’s No. 1 ranking, the position Peninsula has held in USA Today for more than a month.

She is the leading scorer for the Panthers (21-0), averaging 15 points, 7.5 rebounds and two blocked shots a game on a balanced team that returned all five starters from last season’s Palos Verdes squad that was 32-2 and won the State Division III title.

Those who have watched Gausepohl improve as a player in two seasons under Yoshida believe she has a bright future. She signed a letter of intent in November with Virginia, home of 6-5 twins and former Palos Verdes basketball standouts Heather and Heidi Burge.

“We played against her in a summer game two years ago and she wasn’t that good,” Brea-Olinda Coach Mark Trakh said of Gausepohl. “We stopped her with a 5-9 kid who was average.”

Trakh’s opinion changed dramatically after Gausepohl had game-high totals of 21 points and 17 rebounds last month in Peninsula’s 48-42 nonleague victory at Brea-Olinda (21-2), which is ranked No. 1 in the Southern Section Division III sportswriters’ poll.

“We held the other kids in check, but we couldn’t stop her,” Trakh said. “She’s not just a 6-5 kid who is going to post up (inside). She knows what to do with the ball when she gets it. She’s very difficult to defend. We would have had a chance at an upset if not for her.

“You can’t teach a kid how to be 6-5, but she also knows how to play the game. She would be a good player if she was 5-5. She has those skills.”

Gausepohl credits Yoshida for her rapid development after she transferred from Kennett High in Kennett Square, Pa., where she had attracted notice as a rising star during her freshman and sophomore seasons. Her parents checked out Brea-Olinda and Palos Verdes before deciding to move to the peninsula area.

Gausepohl’s transfer to Palos Verdes coincided with that of another talented junior, point guard Kristen Mulligan, who had been an All-Southern Section selection at Santa Margarita High in south Orange County.

At first, the change to a faster-paced game in Southern California had Gausepohl longing for the East Coast. Her parents gave her the option of returning to Kennett for her senior year if she did not like Palos Verdes.

She nearly took them up on it.

“During the beginning of (last) season, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to handle this. I think I want to go back,’ ” she said. “I was really, really lost. Everything happened three steps faster. I was making mistakes I hadn’t made since the seventh grade.”

By the middle of her junior season, though, Gausepohl had adapted to the faster game, and her improved play was a big reason for Palos Verdes winning Southern Section, regional and state titles. She scored a game-high 21 points in the Division III regional final against Lompoc.

“By the end of the season, it was like, ‘Hey, I got it together. Now I can do this,’ ” she said. “The second Morningside game was the turning point. We lost that game, but I played really well.

“I’ve learned so much in the period of time that I’ve been here. I’ve still got a lot of learn, but in one year Wendell taught me what would have probably taken me five years to learn in Pennsylvania. I learned to love the fast game. I couldn’t go back to walking the ball up the court and playing a stall. That was the style back there. There wasn’t a 30-second shot clock, so there was no reason to push. Out here it has to be a much faster game.”

The rewards for her improved play came after the season. She was named to the All-Southern Section, all-state and The Times South Bay all-star teams.

In December, Gausepohl started where she left off last season. She was named most valuable player of the Capital City Shootout in Sacramento after finishing with 27 points, 16 rebounds and four blocked shots in a 67-44 final victory over Del Campo of Fair Oaks.

In the following weeks, she was named all-tournament at two “Tournament of Champions” in Santa Barbara and New York City, distinguishing herself against top-notch competition on both coasts.

“I started off on the right foot this year,” she said. “I think playing hard teams at the beginning of the season got everybody tuned in. I think that helped the team. I know it helped me. I had to play to my potential, and not with early season jitters.”

Gausepohl’s poise and talent as a basketball player can be traced to her early exposure to the sport. Her father, Jeff, is 6-3 and played basketball for Virginia Military Institute. Her mother, Vicki, is 6-1 and played high school basketball in Oregon. Jeffra is an only child.

“My dad used to take me to the gym when I was 2 or 3,” Gausepohl said. “I’d play around, trying to get the ball into the basket.”

Gausepohl’s first taste of organized basketball came after her family moved from Kennett Square to South Korea, where her father was transferred for his job. At 6, she began playing in recreation leagues on a U.S. Army base. She was the tallest player and only girl.

“Guys would never pass me the ball because I was a girl,” she said. “I could be standing there, jumping up and down beneath an eight-foot basket, and I was 4-foot-something, and the coach would be yelling, ‘Pass it to Jeffra, pass it to Jeffra.’

“One time a guy put the ball on his hip and said, ‘I’m not passing to her, she’s a girl.’ I think in five years of playing, I might have scored maybe 12 points. Anything I got was off a rebound or on the freak chance that somebody missed the pass and I got it.”

Gausepohl no longer worries about developing an offensive game. As the top scorer for Peninsula, she is shooting 55% from the field and 79% from the free-throw line. Last season, she made only 55% of her free throws.

“She has a good, soft shooting touch,” Yoshida said.

Gausepohl said that comes from countless hours of working with her father, who coached the South Korean men’s basketball team at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. She refers to him as “my own personal coach.”

“My father had me shooting one-handed properly by the time I was 8,” she said. “He started me out shooting foul shots. When I made two one-handed foul shots, we’d go get ice cream. When that got easy, I’d have to make four foul shots to get ice cream.”

The games eventually evolved into friendly competition between father and daughter by the time Gausepohl had reached junior high. The family driveway in Kennett Square was set up like a small arena, complete with basket, foul line, three-point line and spotlights.

“My dad and I would go out almost every day and play,” she said. “He would baby me at first because he’s a lot wider than I am. He doesn’t like to play against me anymore because the last time we played I beat him 11-2. But he’ll always work with me.”

Gausepohl’s mother is reluctant to join her daughter on the court after suffering a bloody nose from a stray elbow during a game of one-on-one when Jeffra was in the ninth grade.

When she arrived at Palos Verdes, however, Gausepohl was not considered a physical player. She was already 6-5, but weighed only 150 pounds. Primarily through weightlifting, she has put on 30 pounds since then to strengthen her inside game.

“She’s a lot stronger this year,” Yoshida said. “She’s taking it to the basket a lot stronger. She has much better hands. She’s getting rebounds that she didn’t get last year. She’s reaching up and grabbing balls in. A lot of times, she will get a long ball with one hand and snatch it in.”

Yoshida added that Gausepohl’s intelligence and willingness to learn have also enhanced her game. She has a 3.8 grade-point average out of a possible 4.0 and scored 1,230 out of a possible 1,600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. She plans to study education and become an elementary school teacher.

Gausepohl, who says she grew three inches a year between 9 and 14, is comfortable with her height, even when others are not. Because she was tall for her age, her parents enrolled her in school a year early. She turned 17 last week.

“People either think, ‘It’s great you’re so tall,’ or ‘Don’t you hate it?’ ” said Gausepohl, who stood 6-4 when she was 14. “It’s hard to find clothes that fit. I have to get a lot of men’s clothes or get clothes tailored to fit me. Tall women’s shops are very rare, extremely rare. I know of two. One has decent clothes. The other one has clothes that I wouldn’t wear if I was 60 years old.”

Meeting boys can be just as troublesome. Gausepohl currently dates 6-7 Shani Kennedy, a basketball standout for Culver City High.

“I have no problem with a guy being shorter than me, but some guys have that ego, ‘Oh, she’s tall. I can’t handle that,’ ” she said. “In my last formal (dance) picture, they made me bend my knees because I was taller than my date. But I don’t mind.”

Of course, her height always is an advantage on the basketball court. With Gausepohl and 6-3 Monique Morehouse on the front line, Peninsula has dominated Bay League opponents, winning by an average margin of 50 points. The Panthers improved to 6-0 in league play Wednesday with a 78-22 victory over Hawthorne. Gausepohl had 16 points and 12 rebounds.

In one league game, Gausepohl said, she grabbed a rebound away from another girl who had jumped as high as she could. Gausepohl was standing flat-footed.

“I just thought, ‘This is stupid,’ ” she said.

Because of the lack of competition during league play, Gausepohl said the Panthers are staying sharp in preparation for the Southern Section Division I playoffs by challenging each other in practice.

“During league Wendell gets more intense (in practice) because he knows our games are less intense,” she said. “We beat each other up.”

It is part of the process for a team that has its sights set on perfection.

“We’ve got one of the best girls’ basketball teams, potential-wise, that has ever been put together,” Gausepohl said. “Last year our team goal was to be nationally ranked (Palos Verdes finished No. 13 in USA Today) and No. 1 in the state. This year it’s to be No. 1 in the state and No. 1 in the country.

“We know if we work hard enough and put our time in, we can do it.”

With that, Gausepohl knocked on the wooden table next to her.

Regardless of how tall or talented you are, it never hurts to have a little luck.