El Dorado’s Renken Grows Into Game : High school: Off-season work ethic helps senior forward raise game to higher level.

Shanna Renken remembers it well. She was sitting on the bench, and every time El Dorado Coach Gary Raya would walk past her in the 1992 Southern Section semifinal against Inglewood Morningside, Renken would look the other way, hoping he somehow wouldn’t notice her.

“It was my freshman year,” she recalled. “We were in CIF and I didn’t even know what CIF was, and Morningside was supposed to be real good. And I was thinking, ‘I hope he doesn’t put me out there.’ ”

Raya stopped and spoke. “You go in.”

Renken can still feel that knot in her stomach.

“It was toward the end of the first quarter,” she said. “We were playing real bad. I noticed no one else was scoring, so I thought, ‘How can I possibly score?’ ”

She scored right away, on a move to the basket.

“It was like, ‘Whoa, maybe I can do this,’ ” Renken said. “After that, I would spend all my time off the court playing.”

Renken now lives on the basketball court, honing her skills for an El Dorado team that is one of the county’s best, a team that hopes to reach a Southern Section final after reaching the semifinals twice--including last year--and quarterfinals once in the past three years.

Renken and her teammates will get a workout this week, beginning at 6 p.m. today with the first game of the El Dorado Co-ed Classic.

As a freshman, Renken had played hardly any basketball at all. Her sport was soccer, and she went out for the basketball team to try to escape some of the pressures of being a club soccer goalkeeper. But two weeks into the season, she made the junior varsity team because of her natural talent. Four games later, after the varsity team was hit by injuries, Renken was on the varsity, a freshman out of water.

But she has been quite a catch since.

Renken, a senior forward who is 5 feet 11, averaged nine points and 12 rebounds as a sophomore and 14 points and 14 rebounds in an injury-riddled junior year--she missed 14 games because of a knee injury. This season, she knocked Raya over with her off-season work ethic.

“She’s the first player to start with me and go through the program and achieve this kind of success,” Raya said. “Her commitment to the game and conditioning to prepare for her senior year has been a great example for her teammates to follow.

“She’s an overachiever--not playing (any appreciable) ball until high school and then getting in a semifinal game as a freshman--she works hard. Her size and athletic ability is good, and her quickness sets her apart.”

Renken has, in some ways, been an early- and late-bloomer.

“On the court, her skills came quicker than we expected,” Raya said. “Off the court, she got there a little slower. When she realized what she does off the court affects what takes place on the court, she set her sights on the right things and made a commitment to the right things.

“She has grown into her body and grown into an adult--that’s the most important thing. She realized how important academics are, and her commitment to academics and basketball followed.”

Grand Canyon (Ariz.) University has been impressed. It has shown the most interest in Renken, and she likes the idea of going to a small school instead of a high-profile program.

“I think I would just feel more comfortable,” Renken said. “It would be like it was here, where the basketball program wasn’t really anything and we just built it up.”

Other colleges that have shown interest include St. John’s, Arizona State, Portland, Northern Illinois and Stetson.

“College coaches are just dumbfounded that it’s only her fourth year of basketball and that she’s as strong as she is without ever lifting weights on a consistent basis,” Raya said. “They’re thinking that once they get her into the weight room, she can be a pretty good player.”

Which isn’t to say she’s not a pretty good high school player now. Her improvement over last year has been considerable, Raya said, and some of Renken’s newfound insight has come from an unusual source--coaching. The act of coaching, not from someone else’s coaching.

She and former El Dorado teammate Jody Caruso coached a group of seventh- and eighth-graders earlier this year, and she found it to be as enlightening as getting into the Morningside game 3 1/2 years ago.

“I did it to be fun,” Renken said. “I learned a lot from it. You see the game a whole different way.”