A DEEP POOL

Given its miles of coastline and beach-playground image, Orange County’s long history of success in aquatic sports is no surprise.

Children who grow up around the water are more likely to make an athletic splash. So when you search for the reasons behind the area’s dominance in high school water polo, you can start with the refrain from an old beer commercial:

It’s the water--and a whole lot more.

First, Orange County has the pools--you can’t play water polo in the Pacific Ocean. The county has eight 50-meter facilities, a size considered state-of-the-art in the sport.

Then, the county has kids. Since 1972, the Anaheim Hills-based Southern California age group water polo league has been teaching the sport to children 13 and younger. Sixteen of the 25 teams in the league are based in Orange County.

But most important, the county has the coaches. Two of the last three U.S. national team coaches have been Orange County high school coaches, Corona del Mar’s John Vargas and Newport Harbor’s Bill Barnett.

Players aren’t unaware of such lofty credentials. “Barnett knows so much about the game,” Newport Harbor goalkeeper Jon Pharris said. “He’s a fountain of information.”

There are many other coaching standouts.

In this era of walk-on coaches and rapid turnover, the county has more than its share of water polo institutions. Fountain Valley’s Ray Bray has been coaching for 30 years. Jeff Ehrlich has been at Villa Park 24 seasons. Don Stoll has been at El Toro for 17 and started at Westminster in 1971.

And Jim Sprague, who helped start the Sunny Hills program in 1968, is still going strong in his sixth year at Servite.

The result of this convergence is easily seen in the Southern Section record book. Since 1965 when Corona del Mar beat El Segundo, 8-7, for the section title, Orange County teams have won all but four major division titles.

Newport Harbor has won 10 times. Corona del Mar nine, Sunny Hills four and El Toro three.

The dominance doesn’t stop with the highest division. In 3-A (now Division II) play, starting in 1974, county teams won 12 of the first 20 titles before it became an all-Orange County division in 1994.

To more fully appreciate the county’s place in high school water polo, you have to hear the lament of a Los Angeles County coach. Rich Corso, in his 12th season at North Hollywood Harvard-Westlake, says bringing his team to Orange County for games is like taking the U.S. national team to Europe.

Corso, the coach of the U.S. team from 1993 to the Atlanta Olympics, is familiar with the feeling. European powers such as Spain, Germany, Hungary don’t have to travel far for a game against top competition, and neither do Foothill, Newport Harbor and Corona del Mar.

So Harvard-Westlake comes south, because few county teams are willing to play in North Hollywood. “They won’t leave their area,” Corso said. “I’d have to get a television contract from ESPN to get them come up here.”

The long drive wears on the players and Corso said the home teams often get favorable treatment from referees.

“We’re three or four goals behind before we get in the water,” Corso said, “I don’t think the referees are doing it on purpose. It’s just because when you see the kids more, you know their moves and you are more apt to let them play.”

But Corso said Orange County’s advantages are not insurmountable. “I think if you have somebody there running a year-round program and that’s very serious about the sport,” he said, “you could have success in Riverside, Catalina, El Segundo or North Hollywood.

“We don’t have a real good facility here, but we have a lot of kids who are interested and want to play at a high level.”

And some inroads have been made. Harvard-Westlake is ranked fourth in Southern Section Division I. Long Beach Wilson is top ranked and undefeated in its last 35 games. Coach Ricardo Azevedo, who was Corso’s assistant on the U.S. national team, has led Wilson to Division I titles in two of the last three years.

But Wilson is not without an Orange County influence. Stan Sprague, the former coach at Canyon High, is an assistant coach. Servite’s Jim Sprague, no relation to Stan, said it doesn’t stop there.

“Wilson is getting a ton of kids from Orange County,” Jim Sprague said. “All those Seal Beach kids are going to Wilson. They’re not making it on Long Beach kids.”

Azevedo bristled at that suggestion. “That’s an absolute lie,” he said. “In the nine years I’ve coached at Wilson I’ve only had one player from Seal Beach.

“It’s really upsetting when someone says something like that.”

Wilson players are different from those who typically make up teams from Orange County or Harvard-Westlake, Corso said. He said they are mostly city kids, more gritty than their suburban opponents. “It comes out in the way they play,” Corso said. “They’re street tough and they’ve got the great aquatic background from being beach kids too.”

Such a combination played a part in Orange County’s water polo rise. The strong aquatic base has been here for years, and Jimmie Smith took advantage as coach at Fullerton High starting in 1933. He later enjoyed a long, successful stint at Fullerton College.

But polo really hit its stride here in the 1960s, largely because one man, Ted Newland, found a way to make his players tougher than the rest.

When Newland took a job at Newport Harbor in 1956, the school had no water polo team. Then in the summer of 1959, Newland, the swimming coach, got a call from Garden Grove Coach Rick Rowland inviting him to field a summer league team.

Newland, who had played the sport at Occidental College, quickly accepted and the Sailors also fielded a team in the fall.

In 1962, Newland moved across town to Corona del Mar and in 1963 he established that school’s water polo program. Two years later, the Sea Kings won the section title.

“We went from nothing to being the best team in two years,” said Newland, who in 1966 took over at UC Irvine, where he remains the coach. “We were the only team doing two-a-day workouts and about the only team lifting weights too.

“We just flew by other teams.”

Newland’s legacy at Newport Harbor was maintained by Barnett, who became coach in 1966. “I emulated Newland’s program as much as I could,” Barnett said.

Over the years, Barnett developed into a renowned water polo tactician and disciplinarian in his own right. His skills helped him become the U.S. national team coach for the 1988 and ’92 Olympics.

Barnett’s teams won 10 titles in 18 years, from 1967 to 1984, but the Sailors didn’t lack for competition, mostly from Cliff Hooper’s Corona del Mar teams and Sunny Hills, a program started in 1968 by Sprague and Hank Vellekamp.

Sprague also was known to be tough. His teams lifted weights in the early mornings; the weight-room door was locked at 6 a.m., no one was allowed in afterward. He also was one of the first water polo coaches to start videotaping games to study tendencies of other teams.

It grew into an intense rivalry. Sprague remembers Barnett being asked before one season, how’s your goalie going to be? Said Sprague: “He said, ‘Who cares, we’re going to be so good that we are going to score more goals than your team is going to get shots against us.’ ”

Eventually, other programs started catching up with Newport Harbor, Corona del Mar and Sunny Hills, but the balance of power didn’t move too far.

El Toro opened this decade by winning three Division I titles, and San Clemente and Foothill each won one. Age-group water polo teams have been thriving for the last 10 years, meaning many county teams are populated with players who have been together for six or more years.

Not all Orange County teams have such advantages but banging heads with the best is helpful for these less-established programs. At Santa Ana Valley, for instance, Coach Victor Perez said he must teach most of his players to swim when they join the team as freshmen.

Now the Falcons are 15-4 and fighting for a playoff spot in the tough Century League. Perez said there are plans to start a year-round club for his players and issued a warning.

“We’ll be hard to beat in about four years,” he said, “if our club team gets going.”