Doing It the Hard Way

Brea Olinda’s Katie Mayberry has a warning for tennis purists: Don’t judge her game by the beauty of her strokes.

“I don’t have a good forehand, a good backhand or much of a serve,” Mayberry said, “I’m short [5 feet 2]. I don’t look all that scary. When we warm up and they see my serve, her coach will usually say, ‘Well, we’ve got this one.’ ”

But often Mayberry’s more experienced opponent--the one with the textbook groundstrokes--will leave the court muttering to herself and her bewildered coach.

“Somehow, the score usually seems to go my way,” Mayberry said.

Score one for the sandlot tennis player.

Unlike baseball, basketball or football, tennis has never been much of a sandlot game. Most of the professional and highly ranked junior players started young and honed their games at country clubs, academies or their backyards, and most were helped along by private coaches or dedicated parents.

The club player and the self-taught or sandlot player use essentially the same equipment and the same rules, but they typically don’t play the same game.

William Lou, girls’ coach at Garden Grove High, said he can identify a club player within seconds.

“These girls’ footwork is impeccable,” Lou said. “Their groundstrokes are beautiful. They live and breathe tennis. They have that country-club training.”

But Mayberry, Katella junior Angela Rodriguez and Garden Grove senior Nicole Lerma are proof that not every successful player takes the conventional path. Mayberry, Rodriguez and Lerma are not threats to win the Southern Section individual singles title, but each has managed to earn all-league honors despite staying outside the mainstream of the tennis culture.

None of them picked up a racket until the age of 14. None belongs to tennis clubs or pays for private lessons, and each was introduced to the sport during the summer tennis programs at her high school. Lerma is the only one of the three playing junior tournaments, and she won two last summer.

Corona del Mar Coach Tim Mang, whose girls’ team won the Southern Section Division I title last year with an entire roster of players taking private lessons, knows what the sandlot player is up against.

“It’s tough these days for the kid who doesn’t get private instruction,” Mang said. “You can still become a good player, but you have to have one hell of a high school coach who’s able to donate a lot of time. You also have to be a great athlete.”

It’s probably no coincidence that Mayberry, Rodriguez and Lerma play for three of the more dedicated high school coaches in the county--Brea Olinda’s Bob Walton, Garden Grove’s Lou and Katella’s Ryan Farnsworth--and each plays or has played other sports.

In Rodriguez’s case, tennis is her third sport, behind soccer and track. She started playing tennis as a freshman so she could qualify for Katella’s Ironman Award, presented to athletes lettering in three sports. Rodriguez had taken a few tennis lessons in fifth grade, but was essentially a beginner when she entered the summer clinic.

As a freshman, she played junior varsity tennis. Last year, Rodriguez placed third in the Empire League individual singles tournament despite missing part of the season with a knee injury. This season, Rodriguez is 20-7 as the Knights’ No. 3 singles player.

She plays a style similar to Mayberry’s and not entirely different from the pesky Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario’s, though the four-time Grand Slam champion is obviously on a far different level.

“I kind of agitate players,” Mayberry said. “I pretty much get to everything. I don’t really play a defensive game, but I wouldn’t say I play an offensive game either.”

Rodriguez uses every edge she can find against technically sound opponents.

“A lot of tournament players think they can intimidate me, but I turn that around on them,” she said. “I just come out and fire away. I have nothing to lose, so I go for everything.”

Said Farnsworth: “Some of the more experienced players try to beat Angela mentally, but that doesn’t happen very often. She’s so strong-minded. I don’t have many girls like her.”

Mayberry also compensates for her lack of experience by trying to gain a mental edge.

“I’ve learned to play a lot smarter,” she said. “I don’t really have any winning shots, but people hate to play me because I’m very consistent. Once they start throwing their racket and yelling at themselves, I know I’ve got them.”

Walton said he is amazed by some of the upsets Mayberry, whose record is 23-4, pulls off.

“She’s just a little backboard,” he said. “She doesn’t give them any pace. She’ll drop-shot them and then she’ll lob them. You have to hit winners against her. She rarely loses to a player her equal and she beats players better than her. And she’s got a heart as big as the Grand Canyon.”

Mayberry said her heart often goes out to the heavily favored, well-schooled opponents she beats.

“These girls have a lot of pressure to win from their parents,” Mayberry said. “The parents think, ‘We’ve spent all this money on you. You have to win.’ ”

And when they don’t?

“I had a player who sneezed on her hand before she went up to the net to shake my hand,” said Mayberry, a Times Orange County second-team selection the past two years. “She didn’t even wipe it off on her tennis skirt or anything. I thought that was pretty poor sportsmanship.”

Mayberry might dink some of her opponents to death, but she also takes her lumps. When she faces a top-notch player on her game, Mayberry is helpless, and not even Walton’s prematch strategy sessions are much help.

“There are days when I see that I could use some help, especially on my serve,” she said. “It’s so awful in comparison to my opponents. The girls who have coaches even have good second serves. I’d settle for a good first serve.”

Mayberry tried to improve her serve. Her parents briefly hired a serving coach and they later asked if she wanted a full-time coach. Mayberry declined.

“I decided I would divide my time into other things,” said Mayberry, who has a 4.67 grade-point average and is editor of the school newspaper. “We pretty much decided that tennis would be my fun in high school.”

But that isn’t the case with Lerma, who after only three years of playing has her eye on a college athletic scholarship. Lerma has come further than Mayberry or Rodriguez, but she also has had more help.

She began playing over the summer between eighth and ninth grade after signing up for Garden Grove’s summer clinic for $25. As a freshman, Lerma played doubles for the junior varsity. By her sophomore year, she made the varsity and played No. 3 singles.

Without money for private lessons, Lerma became her own coach.

“I’d hit the wall for hours,” she said. “I’d run and condition on my own. I worked really hard to improve. My life was tennis. I was very dedicated. If I wasn’t playing tennis, I was watching it on television or going to tournaments, trying to pick up anything I could.”

But Lerma knew there was only so much she could do for herself, and there was only so much individual attention Lou could give her at Garden Grove. Fortunately, her grandfather, Vince Lerma, came up with a solution.

Lerma had been giving golf lessons to Marty Junor, a tennis instructor at Ridgeline Racquet Club, for years. He offered Junor free golf lessons if Junor would reciprocate and give his granddaughter free tennis lessons. Junor accepted, and suddenly Lerma was taking instruction at a private club and saving $48 an hour.

“I would have never been able to afford it,” said Lerma, who has been with Junor for 18 months. “My family, we lucked out.”

Junor said he’s the one who lucked out.

“I thoroughly enjoy teaching her,” Junor said. “I wish all my students were as positive and worked as hard as Nicole. She still has to build a little more consistency in her game and play more aggressively, but she hasn’t even come close to reaching her potential.”

Not only did Junor refine Lerma’s strokes and build her confidence, he gave her some direction. On Junor’s advice, Lerma began finding better competition in weekend junior tournaments.

“It’s really hard going from playing our [Garden Grove] league matches to playing these girls who have been playing since they were 3,” she said. “It’s kind of intimidating. They’re on such a different level than you.”

But Jim Hillman, director of the Southern California Tennis Assn., said young players need to be introduced to that next level.

“It’s very tough these days to get good without some help,” Hillman said. “Even the kids who play dual sports have a difficulty. Tennis takes quite a bit of time and energy. You can go and work out all you want, but you have to play those tournaments to develop your game and learn how to win.”

Lately, Lerma’s game has been developing rather quickly. She played No. 2 singles last year for the Argonauts, and this year, she’s playing No. 1 singles and has a 23-4 record. Over the summer, she won a tournament at El Dorado Park and another at Ridgeline.

The next step is a college scholarship.

“I love the game of tennis,” Lerma said. “And if tennis can help me get a scholarship, I’d love it even more.”

Mayberry probably isn’t talented enough to play tennis in college, but Walton thinks she might be happy she played in high school.

“It shows the colleges that they participated at a pretty good level and that they maintained it all through high school,” Walton said.

Rodriguez, a center midfielder for Katella, said she hopes to earn a soccer scholarship next year.

“Soccer has always been my first love, but I do wonder how good I could have been if I played tennis full-time and had a private coach,” she said. “I did learn a lot quickly.”