For the First Time, Moorpark Girls Have a Team of Their Own

A few months ago, Pamela Tonini, Jessica Lesiak and Jill Bronkowski were nothing more than friends who liked to play tennis now and again.

“I don’t know if you’d call it tennis,” Lesiak said.

Explained Tonini: “Balls flew everywhere. We were just having fun.”

Now, the pals are tri-captains of the newly formed Moorpark High girls’ tennis team. The squad begins its inaugural Marmonte League season against Thousand Oaks in a little more than a month.

Moorpark decided to add the team in response to increasing concerns over gender equity. The school is also establishing a girls’ golf squad.

“We have boys’ teams in those sports,” Athletic Director Rob Dearborn said.

“To be fair, we had to balance that out.”

Susie Roberts, a special education teacher at the school, got the word late in May. She was selected head coach and had just one week before summer break to round up players.

Roberts talked to every young athlete she knew on campus. She put up flyers in the locker room. At the end of the week, she had 31 girls show up.

“If only you had been there for that first practice,” she said. “We didn’t have tryouts, we just took everybody. A lot of them didn’t have racquets.”

Nor does Moorpark have courts for practice. Roberts and her team--which has dwindled to 24--must squeeze onto two courts in a public park across the street. That often means only four girls playing at a time.

“You’ve got 20 girls standing around,” Tonini said. “Everyone’s waiting in line for drills.”

The coach spent much of the early summer introducing her players to the basics of the sport.

In accordance with Southern Section rules, she stopped working with the team recently and cannot begin fall practices until Aug. 23.

In the meantime, the tri-captains are organizing voluntary workouts.

“We do a lot of drills,” said Tonini, a senior. “We have a lot of determination and we’re definitely getting better.”

Just how much better won’t be evident until the season begins. The Marmonte League is strong in girls’ tennis, so Moorpark won’t find many breaks in its schedule.

“The girls already know what they are up against,” Roberts said. “But they have a lot of heart.”

They also seem to have patience, which could come in handy.

“I don’t expect us to win,” said Lesiak, a junior who plays soccer. “It’s going to be an experience. If we keep working, we’ll probably have a pretty good team.”

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Jenny Munroe of Hart and Stephanie Berg of Harvard-Westlake played on a Southern California squad that won the USTA Girls’ 16 Zone Team Championships in Salt Lake City this week.

The competition drew five-player teams from various USTA sections ranging from California to Minnesota.

The winning Southern California squad defeated a team from the Southwest section in the final on Thursday.

Munroe was just happy to get off her feet.

“I got blisters on my toes on Sunday,” she said. “So I had to play through a lot of pain.”

Nevertheless, she lost only one match all week. Berg, her regular doubles partner, was undefeated.

For both players, the zone championships offered a rare chance to be on a team with girls they knew from junior tournament circuit.

“This is really nice because most of the time people from your section are the opponent,” Berg said. “In the zonals, you’re playing with them. I loved it.”