Getting a Handle on Pioneer Spirit : Anthony Tauriello’s Intensity Spurs Simi Valley Success

You’re watching the Simi Valley High basketball team practice and the word nondescript just keeps shooting through your mind.

Look at them. Average height. Average build. Average talent.

Yet this group has found a way to win 17 of 21 games. Ask around and you’ll hear that much of the credit goes to Anthony Tauriello.

He’s the one with the knee brace, struggling through “suicides” by himself while his teammates watch. His mouth has gotten him in trouble again.

Which brings us to what makes Tauriello so good. Which brings us to what makes the Pioneers so good.

Tauriello’s attitude.

“He expects a lot,” teammate Dan Van Etten said. “He expects perfection. He is emotional out there. If someone drops a pass or makes a bad read, it makes him pretty mad.”

When that happens, Tauriello lets his teammates know. And when Tauriello talks, people listen.

“We take it as criticism,” Van Etten said. “We know he is just trying to make us better. I guess that’s his job. He’s the leader.”

Tauriello is well on his way to winning his team’s most valuable player award for the sixth consecutive year. Junior high. Frosh-soph. Junior varsity. Whatever the level, Tauriello was the leader.

“I just love to win and I can’t stand to lose,” Tauriello said. “I’ll do anything to win. A lot of times that means me being a leader and picking everyone else up.”

Tauriello, who is 6 feet 1 and a slender 165 pounds, does have tangible basketball skills. He is quick, has good shooting touch from outside and is an adept passer. He averages 9.9 assists and 13 points a game.

It was not easy for Tauriello to make it to this point, though. It took lasers poking around in his knee and coaches poking around in his head.

The finished product made his debut as a starting varsity point guard in this season’s Simi Valley tournament, just after Thanksgiving. Tauriello led the Pioneers (17-4, 7-4 in league play) to the championship and took home another MVP trophy.

Not bad for a kid who was on an operating table just weeks earlier.

Tauriello was also a starter at wide receiver and defensive back for the Simi Valley football team last fall. In the Pioneers’ fifth game, something happened to his left knee. He’s not sure what, just that it hurt. Tauriello refused to concede his season was over. He tried for a couple of weeks to play through the injury.

While Tauriello was doing all he could to help the team sneak into the playoffs, basketball Coach Dean Bradshaw was on the sidelines worried about his point guard. It was Bradshaw who convinced Tauriello to have his knee checked out, Tauriello said.

The injury turned out to be torn cartilage. Tauriello underwent arthroscopic surgery on Oct. 24. He was running up and down the court at the Pioneers’ first basketball practice on Nov. 12.

The quick recovery can be attributed to Dr. Mel Hayashi, who performed the surgery, and to Tauriello, who spent two or three hours a day working strength back into his knee.

He went to Hayashi’s house and ran up and down the hill in Hayashi’s back yard. Up and down. Side to side. Up and down. He worked out in the pool, hiked miles to nowhere on a stair-climbing machine and sweated on some high-tech machines at Hayashi’s office that he still can’t describe.

Bradshaw is not surprised that Tauriello made it back to the court so quickly.

“When he gets his mind set in a direction, he is pretty focused in. He is really obsessed with the game,” Bradshaw said.

There is another key to Tauriello’s strength and weakness--he’s obsessed with the game.

“He’s grown a great deal over the past three years,” Bradshaw said. “He came in not controlling his emotions probably as much as we would like and each year he’s gotten better and better at it.”

Tauriello’s mind today works something like a live television show. There’s a little man in his head with his finger on the bleep button.

“I think I’ve changed in yelling at the players,” he said. “I do it in a different way now. I know I was upset with things that happened and (I would) maybe tell them in a negative way. But with Coach Bradshaw’s help, I have learned that I try to help the guys in a positive way.

“Sometimes it gets tough. I want to yell, but I think I have controlled that a lot more than I have in the past. My teammates have to understand it’s nothing personal.”

It seems they do.

“He’s the kind of person you don’t want to let down,” said senior guard J.J. Washington, who also played football. “You need someone like that, who you will just play hard for.”

Still, the man on the bleep button isn’t always quick enough. Like on Dec. 14.

Simi Valley, unbeaten at the time it played its first Marmonte League game, led Thousand Oaks by one point with 13 seconds to play. The Lancers’ Greg Winslow had just been called for fouling Tauriello during a scramble for a loose ball. Tauriello was on his way to the free-throw line, where he had the chance to give Simi Valley a three-point lead, but before he got to the line, he got a technical for taunting.

Tauriello missed the first of a one-and-one at his end, and Thousand Oaks’ Mike Martin made one free throw for the technical, sending the game to overtime. Thousand Oaks eventually won, 92-89, in triple overtime.

“I’ve gotten technicals, but they were never big ones like that that decided a game,” Tauriello said. “I’ve gotten technicals all my life. That’s how I play. If I get upset or angry, I express myself.”

He has been technical-free since that incident, though.

“I learned my lesson the hard way,” he said.