Shaken Hearlihy Shakes Herself : Alemany: After a season flawed by earthquake and one defeat, she presses on.

Alemany High girls’ basketball Coach Melissa Hearlihy gazes into her mental rearview mirror at the past season, marked by the birth of her first child and the greatest coaching success of her career.

And she shudders, seeing traumas that are closer than they appear.

The specter of an unfulfilled season still gnaws at her, and she is reminded of the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake at the end of every day, when she walks into a home that is not hers.

After the violent earthquake pitched Hearlihy and her 1-month-old son, Joshua, through a glass coffee table, Hearlihy refused to re-enter her apartment.

She, Joshua and her husband, Bill, live in the home of one of her former players, but the memory of that horrifying night lingers.

“All I could think was that (Joshua) was going to die,” Hearlihy said recently, sitting in her school office while Joshua slept at her feet in a baby carrier.

She was nursing him that night when the earthquake hit, and she protected him by cradling him in her arms and shielding him with her body as they fell through the glass table.

“I just remember screaming, and it was like the devil,” she said. “The fright of it all and the terror of it all, I’ll never forget. It traumatized me.”

Less traumatizing but similarly memorable was the end of her team’s turbulent dream season in the semifinals of the State playoffs in March.

The five-point defeat to Irvine Woodbridge was Alemany’s only loss of the season and prevented the Indians from achieving their goal of advancing to the State championship game.

Never mind the remarkable accomplishments: How Hearlihy led Alemany to the Southern Section Division II-A title and the most successful season in school history--despite undergoing a Cesarean section birth in December, and then navigating her team through chaotic post-earthquake waters when the school and its gym were closed because of earthquake damage.

No, Hearlihy still focuses more on that one loss.

“I’m still bitter about it,” she said. “I’m mad as hell because I think I should have been (in the State final).

“And when people say, ‘You had a great season,’ at some point I’ll look back and reflect that yes, we did. But I just feel like we didn’t do what we set out to do. I’m not sure we gave it our all, and that’s the part that bothers me.”

It’s an interesting mix: unyielding pursuit of perfection and very human vulnerability.

Before a State playoff game last season, Hearlihy politely shook the hand of each opposing player and wished her luck. After the last player turned away, a serious look crossed Hearlihy’s face and she said to no one in particular: “That’s the end of all the niceties. It’s time to kick some (butt).”

And after that same game, she grew teary-eyed talking to reporters because of the unexpected success of Kathy Reith, a seldom-used Alemany reserve.

That combination of drive and compassion has catapulted Hearlihy from her starting point as an untried assistant 10 years ago to her place as one of the top young girls’ coaches in the state.

Hearlihy, 32, has compiled a 200-47 record in nine seasons at Alemany, winning two Southern Section titles and twice leading her team to the State semifinals.

“She has created the Alemany name,” said senior point guard Kathy Brown.

The Alemany name is synonymous with Hearlihy, the tall, goody two-shoes athlete from Texas.

Born in Whittier, she moved with her family to Dallas when she was 6 years old. Her family moved a few more times and she ended up in Alvin, Tex., for junior high and high school, where she was a standout athlete in track and basketball.

She received early life lessons in overcoming adversity and caring for others--lessons that serve her well as a coach--by growing up with an alcoholic father.

“I was very fortunate that he was not a violent alcoholic,” Hearlihy said. “But he definitely had a mean streak, in that he would come home mad a lot and my mother would have to deal with it.”

Her mother, Billie, was “the perfect role model,” Hearlihy said, and she patterned herself after her mother by always looking after her younger siblings, Doug and Stephanie.

“I would never go out with my friends unless Doug and Stephanie came along, and my friends would get mad, but I would say, ‘Tough.’ I always took care of them and I think it made me a stronger person.”

She also felt a desire to tread the straight-and-narrow path in high school: excellent grades, excelling in sports and--because of her father--shunning alcohol.

After leading her basketball team to the State playoff semifinals and finishing fifth in the state in the discus, she accepted a full scholarship to play basketball at Henderson County Junior College in Athens, Tex.

She also had to accept her parents’ divorce while in college--with surprising difficulty, considering her father’s drinking problem and its effect on the family.

“As long as I had wanted my mother to do that, when it finally happened it was very hard to deal with,” Hearlihy said. “That you were finally a statistic that everybody talked about--that one in three people get divorced.”

One pleasant recollection of her father--whom Hearlihy has not seen in more than two years--is his prediction that she would eventually become involved with kids and coaching.

She pooh-poohed the notion until she worked at a summer camp in college where she discovered the fulfillment and joy of working with young people.

So after playing her final two seasons of college basketball at the University of San Francisco, Hearlihy worked as a graduate assistant at UCLA for one year, and learned a valuable lesson.

“I learned a lot about what college athletics are like, and I really didn’t want to be a part of it,” she said. “The things that are important to me--and that is developing people and relationships--are much more important at the high school level than at the collegiate level, where the athletic part of it is more important.”

Fortunately, a chance offer to coach in a girls’ summer league led to an assistant’s job at Alemany.

And when Nancy Graziano left after that season to take a college job, Hearlihy--then Melissa Melton--was a head coach at 23.

That first season, the Indians lost in the first round of the section playoffs, the earliest postseason exit in Hearlihy’s tenure.

The program has steadily improved and Alemany has advanced to a Southern Section final for three consecutive seasons.

Hearlihy is a striking figure on the bench, standing 6-feet tall with long blond hair, and often screaming in a high-pitched voice at her players.

But her demanding coaching style pales in comparison to the commitment and caring she lavishes on her players.

“She can be a sister, a mother, a teacher,” Brown said. “She seems to relate well to me, and she’s got a sense of humor and she’s very intelligent. She’s the first to admit her own mistakes; she’s not so high and mighty.”

And though the accolades and awards now roll in with increasing frequency, Hearlihy counts her true success on the personal relationships she’s cultivated through coaching.

Eleven of the 12 players on her first Alemany team attended her wedding in 1992. She took wedding photos at the house of a player’s parents, and the reception was held in the school’s gymnasium, which her players and their parents spent two days decorating.

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“My biggest honor is not the championships and all that stuff on the walls,” she said, indicating plaques and trophies. “What’s important to me is when all those kids (from past teams) come back to watch the playoff games.”

She said about 30 former players showed up for the Indians’ section championship game. Hearlihy has engendered such commitment and sense of family by putting her players first.

She scheduled her 1992 wedding to make sure it would not interfere with the playoffs, and two months ago delayed a trip to celebrate her second anniversary to be present at The Times’ All-Valley awards banquet.

But the most striking example of her dedication came last winter when Joshua was born.

The Indians left town for a preseason tournament in early December and Hearlihy had to remain behind because Joshua was due any day.

“When we pulled out of the driveway, she was in tears,” Brown recalled. “It was like she was sending her 12 babies away to have another one.”

But it wouldn’t be easy. She spent three days in the hospital while doctors induced labor, but Joshua still wouldn’t come. She returned after a day’s rest to try again. No go.

So she underwent a Cesarean section birth, and Joshua was born on Dec. 15 weighing 10 pounds 1 ounce and measuring 24 inches.

She told doctors and nurses she planned to coach again inside of a week.

“They laughed at me,” she recalled. “But this year, I felt like that was my commitment to get back to be there with them as soon as I could.”

Five days later she prowled the sidelines during a game at the Simi Valley tournament.

“I think everybody in the gym was wondering what I was doing,” she said. “But I wasn’t going to let something get the best of me.”

That self-reliance was sorely tested in the coming months. The exhaustion of staying up with Joshua every night after a full day of work was grinding her down.

Then the earthquake hit, not only jolting her own life but those of her players as well.

Several of her players--including Samantha Rigley, The Times’ Valley player of the year--had to move from their homes.

And the school’s campus and its gymnasium were closed due to structural damage (they have yet to reopen).

Suddenly, the Indians had no home court.

Hearlihy spent as much time securing practice courts, game sites and driving the team to them as she did coaching.

And there were snags. The day before Alemany’s Southern Section championship game, the fifth-ranked team in the state practiced on an outdoor court.

Through it all, Hearlihy would not let the team falter. Led by Rigley, Carly Funicello, Kelly McKay, Zevette Mitchell, Jen Stoughton and Brown, the Indians continued to win.

But they weren’t playing as well as they did before the quake shook them to their core.

“The Mater Dei coach (who saw Alemany early in the season and in the playoffs) said we were two different teams,” Hearlihy said.

“I said, ‘I know, but what can you do?’ The kids had no normality in their lives. We just had to the best we could.”

Their best was good enough to win their first 30 games, but not the State championship. That fact still rankles Hearlihy and she readily admits it.

However, she is putting it behind her. She and Bill are looking for a new home, summer league play has begun, and philosophic perspective is big on her mind.

“Maybe this was a little thing to make me go back,” she said. “How great would it have been after this year to just quit and have a family? I don’t know if I would have done it, because I do it for the kids and not for the championships, but it’s like it was just enough to light a fire under me to show me how much hard work it takes no matter how good you are.”