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TENNIS / JEFF FLETCHER : Unbeaten Oxnard Adult Team Includes Aces in Other Sports

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Don’t challenge the members of the men’s 4.0 team from Oxnard Tennis Club to a footrace. Or a basketball game. Or a soccer match. Or a tug of war.

Or even tennis.

“We have a real athletic team,” said Mike Ashley, 25, of Ventura.

Ashley is a former college soccer player. His eight teammates include a former college decathlete (Clarence Slayton), a wrestler who qualified for the Olympic trials in 1975 (Bill Rorick) and a long jumper who competed in the Olympic trials in 1976 (Bruce Smith).

Together, they form a team that has compiled a 17-0 record on its way to the U.S. Tennis Assn. Adult League sectional finals, which run today through Sunday at Los Caballeros Sports Village in Fountain Valley.

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Given that athletic background, Ashley feels good about his team’s chances to advance to the nationals in Palm Springs.

“I’m really confident we can win it,” Ashley said. “I think our singles teams should go undefeated.”

Smith and Slayton are the singles players, and they sport contrasting styles. Smith serves powerfully and charges the net, inviting opponents to try to hit the ball past his 6-foot-4 frame. Slayton plays more of a baseline game.

“I love to see a player rush the net because I’ll pass him in a minute,” Slayton said.

Slayton, 40, of Camarillo, competed in the decathlon at Oxnard College in the late 1970s because of a “fluke,” he said. He had been a hurdler on the track team but did not qualify for the league meet in the hurdles, so his coach suggested the decathlon. He agreed because, “I had a few months to get ready,” he said, “and I figured it can’t be that tough.”

Slayton said he finished 10th in the Southern California championships his first time out. But now he plays tennis, with a little basketball and softball on the side.

“No more pole-vaulting for me,” said Slayton, who works for the Oxnard Fire Department.

Smith, 36, of Ventura, was invited to the Olympic track trials as a long jumper in 1976, after he left Ventura College. He then transferred to Oregon State where he was a member of the basketball team for one season (1976-77) and the track team for two (1977 and 1978).

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“Track wasn’t my favorite sport,” he said. “I was more of a basketball guy.”

He’s a tennis guy now--an imposing one too.

“(Smith) intimidates his opponents when he walks on the court,” Ashley said.

Rorick, 35, of Ventura, was 18 when he finished third in the Western region of the Olympic wrestling trials in 1975. He qualified for the national trials in Minnesota but declined to compete, saying he didn’t think he had a chance to qualify for the Olympics. He also balked because wrestling officials would not pay his expenses to Minnesota.

Rorick operates an engineering company that builds the rooms that car manufacturers use to test their cars against wind currents.

Ashley, who played soccer at Cal State Hayward, said he has “owned a tennis racket” his whole life, but he started playing competitively only about four years ago. He is a computer scientist at Point Mugu Naval Air Station.

Ashley is positive that the athletic backgrounds of his teammates will be an advantage in the sectionals--”They can run everything down and tire out our opponents,” he said--but Slayton isn’t so sure.

“The only advantage we’d have is if we’re better athletes and our game is better on that day,” he said.

Add Adult League sectionals: Three Valley teams have qualified for the sectionals.

Tug and Myrna Craig of Chatsworth are the respective captains of a men’s 3.5 and a women’s 4.5 team, both of which are going to the sectionals. Myrna’s team has four players who played on a 4.0 national championship team in 1990 and three who played on the 4.5 champions last year.

Myrna, a co-captain, said her husband and some of his friends watched her team in the 1990 sectionals and “got excited, so they tried to put together their own team.”

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Bill Marrs is captain of a 4.5 men’s team from Chatsworth.

Excluding the team from Oxnard, five Ventura County teams will compete in Fountain Valley. They represent Thousand Oaks Racquet Club (4.0 women), Sunset Hills Country Club in Thousand Oaks (4.5 women), Ventura Tennis Club (3.5 men) and Cabrillo Racquet Club in Camarillo (5.0 men).

The tournament includes 700 players and 59 teams from Southern California.

Learning from his mistakes: Philip Tseng, 15, who will be a junior at Harvard-Westlake High, did not do well on the tennis court this summer in Europe. He lost in the early rounds of all three tournaments in which he played. But that’s OK, he said, because the purpose was to learn.

“It was a really good experience playing against all the Europeans,” Tseng said. “It gave me a new look on tennis.”

He participated in a player-development program sponsored by the USTA in which 10 players 16-and-younger competed in two tournaments in France and one in Italy. Tseng was selected by the USTA to make the four-week trip in June. The tournaments were played on red clay, which Tseng said was a difficult adjustment for a player used to the fast hard courts in the United States.

Junior Nationals wrap-up: Of Valley players in the just-completed Junior nationals, Mike Bryan of Camarillo advanced furthest. Bryan lost, 6-1, 6-1, to top-seeded Geoff Abrams of Newport Beach last Friday in the semifinals of the boys’ 14-and-under tournament in San Antonio.

“I thought I did really good,” Bryan said. “I was seeded fourth going in and I got third.”

His problem was that he had to play Abrams, the eventual champion. Abrams has won all four meetings between the two this year.

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“He was playing the best I’ve seen him play,” Bryan said. “He was hitting too many lines.”

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