La Habra Teen Mother Courts a Dream : Family: Chespi Serna juggles demands of baby, school and basketball with high hopes for future.

The defending state champion Lady Cats basketball team of Brea-Olinda High School is suited up and ready. The players trot out of the locker room carrying jackets, balls, bags of gear. One player--No. 32--carries her 4-month-old son.

Chespi Serna jogs across the gym floor and into the crowded bleachers, a baby carrier cradled in her arms. Snuggled inside is little Juvenal, wearing a tiny basketball jacket. Serna tenderly deposits him with a friend’s mother.

A moment later, she has fallen into line for the lay-up drills, looking like any other player in her yellow, white and green warm-up suit, as the Lady Cats practice for the state basketball playoffs. Tonight they face Carlsbad in the Southern California Division II girls’ semifinal.

Serna, 18, a guard on Brea-Olinda’s varsity basketball squad, one of California’s winningest girls’ teams, had a baby in October and has since defied the odds, not only by returning to school and reclaiming her place on the team, but also by maintaining a B-plus average in her schoolwork.

Where other teen-age mothers have succumbed to the temptation to become dropouts, Serna has redoubled her determination to become the first in her immigrant family to graduate from high school. She envisions going on to college, earning a bachelor’s degree and pursuing a career working with computers.

This almond-eyed teen-ager with a thoughtful manner freely admits that having a child so young was a serious mistake, but says she will not let it ruin her life. She knows what the statistics say: Young women in her situation seldom finish high school, and are more likely to end up on welfare. But she vows she will not.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to get an education and a good job because my baby’s future is counting on mine,” she said recently, sitting cross-legged on the gymnasium floor while her teammates practiced. “Maybe I didn’t have a baby at a perfect time, but my baby can still have a good life.”

At a time when it would be easy to feel isolated and oddly different from her peers, Serna has an extraordinary support network. During practice, her teammates fight for a chance to give “Junior” a bottle or gently rock him in his baby carrier. One teammate, knowing Serna and her live-in boyfriend are short of money, clips newspaper coupons for diapers. Her teammates’ parents take turns looking after Junior during night games.

“We’re just so proud that Chespi came back to school to finish her education,” said Barbara Llanes, a parent who held and rocked Junior at a recent game. “We want to do everything we can to help her do that. A lot of girls who got pregnant would never have done that.”

The athletic booster club and the team threw Serna a baby shower and pays for her full-time baby sitter. Although California Interscholastic Federation regulations generally ban anything of value being provided to players, Keith Erickson, head of the booster club, said he checked in advance with the CIF to make sure the baby-sitting arrangement was within the rules.

Her coach reserved her spot on the team and helped arrange her independent-study courses so she didn’t have to come to campus late in her pregnancy.

“It’s unfortunate it didn’t happen later in her life, but these things happen,” said coach Mark Trakh, who has led the girls’ team at Brea-Olinda to state championships in 1989, 1991 and 1992, and hopes to clinch their third consecutive state championship on March 19.

“This isn’t about right or wrong, this is about what this kid has done to make the best of a difficult situation,” Trakh said. “She’s a battler, a fighter. She’s a kid who made a mistake and is determined to make it anyway. And God, she’s making it.”

Trakh said he believed that if he could persuade Serna to remain on the team, the “feeling of being a part of something successful” would make it easier for her to deal with the stress of juggling her roles as student, mother, daughter and girlfriend.

Serna’s presence on the team has not only become “a very positive, loving situation” but has provided her teammates with valuable lessons about overcoming adversity, Trakh said.

“She doesn’t complain about it. She takes full responsibility,” said Susan Rhodabarger, 17, a junior and fellow Lady Cat. “It shows us that when we have a problem and complain, that we can just deal with it. “

Erickson, the booster club president, said the girls also have learned by vivid example that they can’t be cavalier about sexual activity.

“They can see that Chespi’s weak moment could have ruined her life. They see all the work that having a baby can be. These girls can see that this kind of thing can happen very close to home,” Erickson said.

Indeed, Serna has become anything but a poster girl for early motherhood. She warns her friends to be careful and not repeat her mistake. Even though she adores her little boy, Serna says she still feels a twinge when his needs force her to sacrifice carefree times with her friends.

“My friends say, ‘Oh, we’re going to this club tonight, we’re going here, we’re going there,’ and I say, ‘Oh, I’m probably going to go home and cook dinner,’ ” says Serna, who shares a La Habra apartment with the baby’s father, Juvenal, 25, an auto body shop worker. Juvenal’s cousin lives with them, too, so they can save on the rent.

Her daily schedule demands endurance. Even before she gets to accounting class at 7:55 a.m., Serna must feed, change and dress Junior, drop him downstairs with another of Juvenal’s cousins for baby sitting, and make the 20-minute commute from La Habra to Brea in her 17-year-old Chevy.

“She comes into class and she is ready to work,” said Susan Luce, Serna’s English teacher. “She never makes excuses. And if anyone would have a reason to make excuses, it’s her. She’s an exceptional student. We all should grow up to be that motivated, strong and self-confident.”

Serna has only a one-hour break between classes and her two-hour basketball practice. Finally, after 5 p.m., she returns to pick up her baby, renewing the never-ending cycle of feeding, changing and soothing that can wake her several times each night. The stress of all her responsibility occasionally is overwhelming.

“There are times when he’s crying and I can’t figure out why,” Serna said. “The other day, I had just spent all this time getting him to stop crying, and he was finally quiet. Then I couldn’t find my practice shorts to wash, and I kept looking for them, and finally I just sat down in my closet and cried.”

A year ago, Serna was sharing her parents’ modest home in a close-knit Brea neighborhood. The first member of her family to be born in America, Serna also aspired to be the first to graduate from “real” high school. Four older siblings had dropped out and one finished at a continuation school. Her parents, from small farming towns in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, never completed junior high.

“I imagined the American dream: go to college, get a good job, get married later, and then have a baby,” she said.

Serna had been dating Juvenal for three years. They regularly practiced birth control, she said, but just once, they got careless.

That, apparently, was enough. In Oakland with her team up for the state basketball championship last March, Serna was feeling so tired that she didn’t play. The nausea set in when she returned home. The positive pregnancy test came soon afterward. She was devastated.

“I was crying full-on every day,” Serna said. “I felt like everything was ending. I knew I let my parents down. I knew I had to give up basketball. I thought, ‘I’m only 17 and I’m going to be a mother instead of when you’re supposed to be enjoying life.’ ”

As Catholics, she and Juvenal agreed that abortion was not an option, and neither felt comfortable with adoption. So Serna buckled down for the road to motherhood.

She finished her junior year without showing very much. Medi-Cal paid for her obstetrical visits. But she was depressed. Her grades slipped. She spent the summer withdrawn from friends, afraid of their judgments. Uncomfortable with the constant reminder of disappointing her parents, she left them and moved in with Juvenal.

As fall came, her determination to hold fast to her dreams was mounting.

“I kept remembering what my father said when I told him I was pregnant,” Serna said. “He said, ‘I thought you said you were going to be the smart one and graduate!’ I just knew I had to do it, no matter what.”

Even once she decided to return to school, however, she had to overcome some resistance from her parents. They wanted her to get married, and they felt that playing basketball was “crazy” now that she was a mother with adult responsibilities, Serna said. Juvenal was worried she would neglect the baby by returning to school and rejoining the team, she said.

“But I thought if I graduate with a baby and everything, I will have accomplished that much more,” Serna said.

A week after her 18th birthday, eight-pound, three-ounce Juvenal Jr. was born. Nurses wrapped him in a blue and pink striped blanket and cap and laid him on his mother’s chest. She wept.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Are you real?’ At that moment, all my problems disappeared and I looked at him, and ohhhh,” Serna recalled, her voice trailing off.

But it didn’t take long for reality to set in. Serna remembers the first month home with the baby as a haze of diapers, nursing, sleepless nights, confusion and tears--both hers and the baby’s.

“You think having a baby is so cute, and it’s the hardest job you can ever throw on yourself,” she said.

With four months of experience under her belt now, Serna is a confident mother, playfully tickling her baby’s hands in the locker room before a basketball game, a pale blue diaper bag resting at her black-sneakered feet. The thought of quitting school never enters her mind, she says.

Serna’s mother, Rosario, says she is pleased and impressed that her daughter had the grit to make a comeback after a setback such as childbirth.

“I thought it would be difficult for her to do it all,” Rosario Serna says in soft Spanish. “Now I see how much smarter and stronger she is than I realized.”