Last Laugh Suddenly Belongs to Taft, Turret

During a team meeting early this season, Coach Elliot Turret asked the Taft High girls’ basketball team what its goals were.

When one player mentioned that she wanted to, among other things, make the playoffs and compete for a City Section championship, the reaction was unanimous.

“We all laughed,” senior guard Lanika Manning recalled.

Only a few months later, winning is now serious business.

“They’ve made incredible progress in just about everything,” said Turret, in his first year as Taft’s coach after a seven-year coaching hiatus.

“Given the fact that [Taft’s program] was basically presented to me as a total disaster, I didn’t have any expectations.”

Taft (15-6), seeded 13th out of 16 teams in the 4-A Division, has won nine of its past 10 games heading into a quarterfinal at Westchester (13-12) tonight at 5:30.

After defeating previously unbeaten El Camino Real to end the regular season and then upsetting fourth-seeded Washington, 47-46, in the first round Friday, nobody is laughing at the Toreadors anymore.

“It just showed us that we could compete with any other team,” junior guard Ava Mozafari said. “And if we can handle them, then we can definitely hang with Westchester.”

That’s confident talk. But it’s also indicative of the team’s attitude change since the start of the season--one that began with ill will toward Turret, the Toreadors’ fourth coach in as many seasons.

“We were like, ‘This guy’s crazy,’ ” Mozafari said. “He was making us run all these sprints, and people started hating him. Not a lot of teams condition the way we do. And fundamentals we weren’t used to, he made sure we had them in our heads.”

Turret inherited a Taft program that was last in the West Valley League at 7-12. His demands left his players’ heads spinning.

“We just weren’t used to it,” said Manning, the team’s top defensive player. “But he gave us a lot of individual attention too, and we were like, ‘Whoa, he cares.’

“After that Washington game, I started crying. I just looked at my coach and said, ‘Thank you.’

“This season has been so special. We went from being nothing to being something.”

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In other City Section 4-A quarterfinal games tonight at 7:30, El Camino Real (20-1) plays at top-seeded Narbonne (25-1) and North Hollywood (24-2) plays host to Garfield.