TENNIS / DANA HADDAD : Calabasas: The Young and Restless

If anybody wanted to write a soap opera with a tennis motif, the 1994 season at Calabasas High would provide enough material for several episodes.

The Calabasas story involves nine highly competitive and quite animated teen-age boys and three different coaches with three acutely different styles who each held the reins for approximately one-third of the season.

It should be noted that those coaches--Casey Allen, Cindy Jones and Ed Charles--needed to grip those reins firmly for what was a strange ride. Before the season, the team’s top player was lost to a strange back injury. At midseason the team’s new No. 1 singles player withdrew from school to start a home-study program.

Even bus rides to matches were adventures. Said singles player Alex Wan: “I thought Miss Jones did a good job until the day our bus went to Sunny Hills (High) instead of South Hills.”

The Coyotes also had to postpone a crucial match against Burbank because Allen resigned under pressure that afternoon.

Calabasas eventually played all its matches, finishing 17-4. And despite all the turmoil, the Coyotes were the only area team to win a Southern Section championship when they routed Santa Ynez, 13 2/3-7 1/3, in the Division IV final.

The season remained a circus to the end.

On the eve of the final, Charles, who coached the team the last three weeks, was quoted as saying that his players liked to talk a lot of trash and were listless in practice. The players said they couldn’t believe it when they read those comments the day of the match.

“For the most part, the stuff he said was not true,” said Jeff Herz, a junior who finished the season at No. 1 singles. “We’re all pretty close and we all support each other. In practice, we say stuff to make each other play harder and get better.

“And how can you not work hard and win CIF?”

Even without its top two players, Calabasas was a talented bunch. Most were ranked junior players at one point and were still practicing as many as three hours a day with a private coach. Herz and others, in fact, said they really didn’t need a coach--just someone to supervise and give encouragement.

But portrayed as they were, the players hardly got a warm welcome when they took home the championship trophy.

“When we went to school the next day, a lot of people looked at us as a team that had talent but was a bunch of jerks,” Herz said. “We were upset by that. (Charles) said he did that to pump us up. I think he believed what he said. But I don’t know how he could say that. He was only there for three weeks. He didn’t know the team well enough.”

Charles, the intense former coach at Cal State Los Angeles, was brought in by Jones, the athletic director. The players liked Allen’s positive and relaxed, if not expert, approach to coaching tennis. But it became a little too relaxed, the players said, when Allen’s sister served as a stand-in coach at a couple of matches. Allen, an off-campus coach, got a new job that created schedule conflicts.

Allen eventually resigned and Jones coached the team for several weeks on an interim basis.

“Miss Jones was great,” Herz said. “She really supported us. Her and Casey didn’t know a lot about tennis but they really knew how to pump us up and keep us close as a team.”

But all three coaches were courtside for the final. Charles, carrying a clipboard, hustled from court to court checking scores and plotting strategies. Jones kept the team score sheet. Allen, meanwhile, met discreetly with several players and did his own coaching.

“We felt we could have coached ourselves,” said senior Phil Abramson, who played No. 1 doubles. “We made up the lineup. And if the lineup wasn’t going well, we made suggestions for changes, and those were always the changes the coaches made.”

One could say the inmates were running the asylum. Abramson said he liked the comrade-like approach Allen brought to the job. If the players didn’t want to practice, Allen would call it off. Allen, who plans to take the team to a restaurant this Sunday for a celebration, often would join his players in a game of pickup basketball.

Charles did that once in his brief tenure and got a real eye-opener. The jabbering was at a fever pitch and players scuffled more than once.

“Ed was getting bashed by some of the players after they scored on him,” Abramson said. “He was just getting rocked by (singles player Assi Cohen), and Assi’s got a big mouth. He was talking so much trash. Ed didn’t really like it.

“There’s been a few shoving matches at practice. But it was just competitiveness, we thought. We thought that happens at all practices.”

The Coyotes got a bad rap, Abramson said. They’re good guys, if a bit cocky, he said.