STATE PREP BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS : Knock, Knock: Newbury Park Seeks Title : Superstitious Coach Parvin in First State Championship Game After 21 Seasons

Nori Parvin is untying knots, loosening the thick honeycombs of rope that hold the volleyball nets against the wall in the Newbury Park High gym. Tomorrow, the nets will go up again and Parvin will spend more time untying them before basketball practice can begin.

She has been walking up and down in this gym long enough to get pretty good at it. And as her fingernails work her way through these loops of rope, she is noticing how the years are tying together, more neatly than the knots in the volleyball nets ever do.

Parvin, coach of the Newbury Park girls’ basketball team for the past 21 seasons, will take a team into the State championship game for the first time today. The Panthers (31-1) will play Archbishop Mitty (27-3) of San Jose in the Division III final at 2:30 p.m. in the Oakland Coliseum Arena.

It is not surprising to see Parvin bend over and rap a fist on the hardwood for good luck. On a team replete with superstition, knocking on wood has become a contagious trademark.

Even the walls have caught on.

“Lady Panthers, Good Luck in State Finals,” reads the signboard at one end of the gym. And below it is spread that contrite, three-line message: “Knock on Wood.”

A victory would bind together a career for a coach who has waited so long to get here.

“She’s been around so long, I think she deserves it,” said senior center Kara McKeown.

Parvin, 45, is a compact woman with a head of thick brown hair and a face devoid of ill feeling. It is the perfect face for a favorite teacher.

She is not married and she has no children. Her family is right here in this gym. They are the students who attend her physical-education classes every day and the players on the basketball teams she has coached over the years.

“You watch them grow,” she said. “You watch them grow up.”

She has seen generations grow up and move on, and then she has started over. She has seen it so clearly with this team, her best and most-talented team ever. Parvin has coached four of her seniors--McKeown, guards Jann Thorpe and Julie Wastell and forward Christine Arguijo--for the past three years.

She has been as patient as a coach can be over the years, waiting through 242 victories and 20 seasons for a team with that special quality. Then again, patience is part of Parvin’s nature.

“Hmmm,” McKeown said, trying to remember a violent outburst from her coach. “I don’t know.”

Parvin knew she had something special with this group. So did Kara McKeown’s father, Dennis, a math teacher at Newbury Park who volunteered to be an assistant during his daughter’s varsity years.

Dennis McKeown graduated from Hueneme three years before Parvin. He has been at Newbury Park one more year than Parvin. And he has seen what a long journey it has been for her.

“In some meaningful way, it’s more special because you know all the other sides,” he said.

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Parvin is used to being on the other side of the scorer’s table, setting and resetting the 30-second shot clock, and looking out at the teams on the floor with a twinge of jealousy.

For the past 12 years, she worked the shot clock at Southern Section championship games. This year, she was working the officials. And everything was working.

Newbury Park defeated Bishop Montgomery, 60-50, for the Division III-A title. And the Panthers have kept on winning, defeating Our Lady of Peace, Bishop Montgomery and Santee Santana in the State playoffs to reach the championship game.

Admittedly, Parvin never expected this. Talk to her in a month, she says, and maybe she’ll realize what it means.

“It’s just the way the ball bounced,” Parvin said. “We’ve had good teams before, but the chemistry wasn’t like what it is this year.”

These are players who relate to each other, who understand each other. They are unselfish on the floor. In a 67-57 victory over Santana in the regional final, McKeown, Thorpe, Wastell and guard Renee Intlekofer scored in double figures, and Arguijo had eight points.

That’s nothing new. The Panthers average between 15 and 20 assists per game as a team.

And off the floor, they aren’t afraid to have a little fun with each other.

Parvin understands that. In fact, she usually gets caught up in it all.

“She’s a coach, she’s a friend,” said Ron Gellenbech, an assistant coach. “She’s almost like a sorority sister.”

Of course, there are always skeptics.

After a victory over Our Lady of Peace in the first round of the State playoffs, Parvin was telling her team that this was exactly where they wanted to be. But Dennis McKeown begged to differ. He told the Panthers that they didn’t want to stop there, that they could go as far they wanted to go.

When he finished, there was a brief silence. Then there was a mad scramble for the nearest wooden surface.

Below the surface, there is not much to Nori Parvin. Right now, she is overwhelmed with a sense of awe at all that has happened.

“I’ll probably be up here for another 21 years,” she said, raising an arm of her sweatsuit as high it will go.

She has waited so patiently for this to come that the contentedness could probably last twice that long. Finally, it is her turn. Twenty-one years are tying themselves into a neat ribbon.

Parvin was driving three of her seniors to have their pictures taken for The Times’ All-Valley team Wednesday. They wanted to listen to oldies, music that Parvin listened to in high school. And she smiled.

“Everything always kind of comes together,” she said.