Making Their Move

It was a Sea View League game two years ago. El Toro was on the rise, making noise in the county’s girls’ basketball poll with a lofty record against mostly mediocre or one-dimensional opponents and getting some remarkable scoring from freshman guard Giuliana Mendiola.

The Chargers’ opponent, Woodbridge, was ranked third in the county and would eventually win the state title. People attended the game just to watch upstart El Toro get its comeuppance.

They didn’t go home disappointed.

El Toro lost by 33 points, 85-52, and it wasn’t really that close--it was 40-16 at halftime.

Still, a destiny was forged.

“I’ll never forget that game as long as I coach,” said El Toro Coach Vincent Avitabile, whose previous coaching experience was at a high school and Division II college in Connecticut. “That was just an eye-opener to see how competitive Orange County girls’ basketball is. It showed us how far behind we were in trying to compete with the top 10 teams, and the importance of scheduling.

“I think the kids learned that it’s one thing to beat these weak teams, but to be in that elite group requires a whole different attitude and work ethic. It takes a huge commitment.

“That was the turning point--are you going to do just enough to finish third in league every year and be happy, or work hard and strive to compete against the Woodbridges and the Brea Olindas?”

The Chargers, 27-3 last year and unbeaten in the Sea View League, weren’t content with finishing third.

“It made us want to work harder, get better, and build our program,” said forward Amy Rikimaru.

El Toro goes into this season No. 3 in The Times Orange County preseason rankings. The Chargers ended last season ranked eighth in the county, but made a good impression in the Southern Section Division I-AA playoffs.

El Toro defeated Capistrano Valley in a second-round double-overtime game after trailing by nine points with less than a minute remaining in regulation. The Chargers then got a last-second basket from Amy Everett--one of the least likely players to take a game-winning shot--to beat top-seeded La Crescenta Crescenta Valley in the quarterfinals.

Avitabile admits those could be called “miracle wins.” Perhaps the Chargers should have lost.

But they didn’t.

Still, are they for real?

“I was very impressed with them this summer and fall,” said Jeff Sink, coach of Brea Olinda, the top-ranked team in the county. “We beat them in the summer, but it was a three-point game. They’ll go only as far as the Mendiolas take them, but I’m impressed with the program and their depth on the bench.”

Edison Coach Dave White agreed: “They’re good. They’re real good.”

If El Toro is to win a section title, this is the year to do it. The Chargers have four starters and eight returners from last season, including Mendiola, the team’s leading scorer, and her sister, Gioconda, the second leading scorer. And Avitabile, as part of a master plan he hopes will outlive the Mendiolas’ attendance at El Toro, has put together a schedule to put his program in the big time.

* El Toro will play Brea Olinda and San Clemente, the two teams ranked above them in Orange County. “The best thing of all is we get to play San Clemente on Dec. 15,” Avitabile said, “and that will let us know if we’ve arrived or not.”

* The Chargers will play North Hollywood and Long Beach Poly to expose themselves to a style they’ll face in the playoffs, should the Chargers face Long Beach Wilson again. It was Wilson that beat El Toro in the semifinals, 62-53.

* They’ll compete in two of the most credible tournaments in Southern California: The Santa Barbara Tournament of Champions and the Marina tournament.

“They had to improve their schedule if their ambition is to win it all,” said Sink, whose team won a state title last season. “Last year, they had an amazing run and finally got picked off in the playoffs. If you play four, five, maybe even as many as six games that you’re lucky to win, you can go six or eight games in the playoffs and keep winning. There’s a lot of instruction to be gained from having to play in front of 2,000 people.

“They could beat us, but that’s not what’s important; their kids will play [at Brea] in a hostile environment and they can go to the section finals and say, ‘We’ve been there.’ ”

“Losing is no fun, but you learn more from a big win or a big loss.”

Which takes Avitabile back to Woodbridge two years ago. The Chargers lost the first game by 33 points, the second by 69, 101-32.

“It set us back for awhile in terms of confidence,” Avitabile said. “You can’t tell your kids, ‘We’re playing Woodbridge tonight and we’re going to lose by 40 points.’ But they lost the confidence from all those 13 games we had won before.

“We were up by 18 points against Santa Margarita . . . and they came back on us because we had had easy games and we didn’t have the ability to regroup. It took us the rest of the season to get back to where we were the first time we played Woodbridge.”

And now, they’ve exceeded that. They think they can play with anyone.

Giuliana Mendiola, a junior, has led the county in scoring twice. Last season, she averaged 22.8 points, six rebounds and 4.7 assists. She averaged 24.4 points as a freshman.

How explosive is she? In that victory over Capistrano Valley, Mendiola scored nine points in 56 seconds to tie the score, and scored 19 of her team’s final 29 points. The Chargers, who were never a factor in the game until the final minute of regulation, won by 10. Talk about regrouping.

But the key to the Chargers isn’t Giuliana Mendiola, a first-team Times All-Orange County player last season, as much as it’s her supporting cast, including older sister Gioconda, who averaged 12.4 points and 5.9 assists last season.

“The two sisters play so well together and they make everyone else better,” said White, whose team scrimmaged El Toro last week. “They have good complementary players who can hit the open 10-footer, and with teams concentrating on the Mendiolas, those other players are going to get open shots all night long.”

Everett, a 5-11 senior forward, averaged six points and six rebounds last season, and Rikimaru, a 5-8 guard whose range has extended to the three-point arc, averaged five points and five rebounds. Ingrid Look, a 5-11 senior, worked hard in the off-season to become the starting center.

“I don’t think I’ve seen as much intensity in practice as I’ve seen this year,” said Gioconda Mendiola, a senior guard. “It’s consistent--we’re not up one day, down another.”

Mendiola thinks the most important games in the last three seasons weren’t the losses to Woodbridge, but were those stirring victories over Capistrano Valley and Crescenta Valley.

“To use a cliche,” she said, “we learned to run with the big dogs.”

Those dogs start running this week.

“This is it,” Avitabile said. “This is what we’ve been practicing for since the Woodbridge game.”