Wines Making His Splash After Surgery : Water polo: Knee injury couldn’t have come at worse time for Santa Ana Valley standout, whose quick recovery is scoring points.

As knee injuries go, the one Todd Wines suffered playing beach volleyball in the summer of 1991 wasn’t too serious. However, the timing of the injury couldn’t have been worse for the Santa Ana Valley water polo player.

It just so happened that two months before Wines jammed his knee diving for the ball, his father, Jerry, had been laid off from his job after 20 years in the computer industry, causing the family to lose its medical insurance.

Therefore, Wines learned a frustrating lesson of these recessionary times: Without insurance, arthroscopic knee surgery may be as hard to schedule as open heart surgery.

By the time the Wines family found a specialist that would accept Medi-Cal for the $16,000 operation, the water polo season was over and Wines had played in only one match.

“It was really hard because we were trying not to go into the welfare system,” said Wines’ mother, Cheryl. “We didn’t want to do that, but it was really frightening, especially when you have a son like Todd who’s a top-notch athlete.

“We didn’t want him to have to throw all that away.”

The support the Wines received from friends and boosters of the Falcons’ water polo program helped the family manage until Jerry found another job early this year.

And although his junior season was lost, Todd is more than making up for it this year and Santa Ana Valley is reaping the benefits.

In the Falcons’ first two matches of the season, Wines scored 20 goals in tournament victories over Huntington Beach and the El Toro JV. Entering the Century League opener Tuesday against Villa Park, he has 83 goals and 23 assists and, not coincidentally, Santa Ana Valley is 14-3 and has moved into the Southern Section coaches’ top 10 for the first time since 1985.

“He has 50 ways to score,” Santa Ana Valley Coach Kirk Dennis said. “He’s a lot like Michael Jordan in that if we need him to, we can say, ‘Todd go one-on-one’ and we clear out a side of the pool for him.”

H2O Wines?

Perhaps, but like Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, the Falcons have found they are a better team when more than one player is involved in the offense.

For instance, in the Long Beach Millikan tournament, Esperanza held Wines scoreless and beat Santa Ana Valley, 8-3. That loss inspired a Falcon team meeting, during which players discussed how to get better offensive balance.

The next day, in their final two matches of the tournament, they defeated Dos Pueblos, 21-5, and Millikan, 13-10. Wines scored six goals against Dos Pueblos, but only one against Millikan.

“I like to score,” Wines said. “I think the feeling of everyone cheering after you get the ball in the goal is great, but if somebody else has a better opportunity to score, I’ll get the ball to him.”

Santa Ana Valley is an unlikely place to find a standout water polo team. The best polo teams are stocked with players from local aquatic feeder programs; Dennis has to teach some new players to swim.

“It’s kind of baffling why some of the kids join the team,” Dennis said. “I guess they think it’s swimming lessons.”

But some of the non-swimmers learn to be outstanding players by the time they are juniors and seniors. Danny Ramirez, who set the school’s single-season scoring record of 117 last season and is now playing at Rancho Santiago College, could barely swim across the shallow end as a freshman.

Wines is an obvious exception. At 6 feet and 180 pounds, he is one of the fastest players in the Southern Section--the proof being his third-place finish in the 50-yard freestyle in the Division 4-A swimming championships last spring.

He started swimming with a club before entering kindergarten and then followed three older brothers onto the Falcons’ water polo team.

Since 1983, there have been only two seasons (1987 and ‘88) that a Wines wasn’t on the Santa Ana Valley varsity and the school record book is filled with the family’s name.

Jerry, a 5-11, 265-pound holeman, led the team to its only league title in 1985. In 1986, Jeff scored 110 goals, which tied what was then Jerry’s single-season scoring mark, and moved into second place behind Greg LaPoint (217 from 1982 to ‘84) on the career scoring list with 215. Troy was a part-time starter in 1989 and ’90.

But by the time this season is over, Todd should stand alone at the top of the family- and school-record books.