PHYSICAL THERAPY : At Oak Grove, Basketball Makes Girls Feel Good About Themselves, Even if the Scores Look Pretty Bad

Trista Tequillo dribbles up the floor, sticks four fingers in the air, shouts the play to the Oak Grove Monarchs.

Three of whom are standing out of bounds.

Ellissa Johnson hustles down the court, through two defenders, into position under the basket.

When an errant pass bounces off the back of her head.

The game ends, and the most courageous high school team in Southern California does one more thing that drops the jaw.

Sweat glistening on their young faces like armor, they smile.

Defeated, 53-6.

Losers of their first five games by a combined margin of 266-29.

Feeling unbeaten.

“I know it sounds funny, but, you know, sometimes when I’m out there, I feel like a pro,” Tequillo says.

“Yeah,” Johnson says. “Like I can do something.”

Losing?

These eight special girls understand losing.

This isn’t it.

Losing is obsessing over a broken shoelace one minute, wanting to kill yourself the next.

Losing is believing everybody thinks you’re stupid, then punching a wall or a teacher to prove it.

The 65 high school students at the Oak Grove Institute in Murrieta have problems or issues that interfere with their ability to be educated in a regular school setting.

So starting a girls’ basketball team from scratch?

Having the guts to play in front of fans when you don’t even know how to dribble?

Handling big losses and long stares?

That’s not losing.

That’s living.

For eight special girls, that’s winning.

“I didn’t know the difference between full court and half court,” said guard Crystal Traverson, 14. “But I know that playing basketball makes us feel like we’re everybody else.”

A team temporarily stained by the stresses of life, playing sports for the purest of reasons.

Not for stardom, but strength.

“We fall down,” Traverson said. “Then we get back up.”

The transformation is always the same.

When the Oak Grove Monarchs take the floor at their opponents’ gym--they have no school facility--opponents and fans wince.

Balls are thrown off the backs of backboards, or into the bleachers. Some girls can’t pass, others can’t shoot, and some don’t know the rules.

In the team’s first game, one girl grabbed a rebound after a teammate missed a free throw, and dribbled the length of the court to the wrong basket.

In their second game, two different girls did the same thing.

In that recent 53-6 loss to the California School for the Deaf at Riverside junior varsity squad, the Monarchs did not score in the second half.

In the third quarter, they could not even hold the ball long enough to try a shot.

But then, by the end of that game, like all their games, everything changed.

The opposing fans began cheering for them.

The referees stopped calling every little infraction and began giving Coach Gavin Pachot advice.

The Monarchs realized they were not alone.

A couple of games ago, when Tequillo was helped off a hostile court after spraining an ankle, she was even given a standing ovation.

“I was like, ‘Ohhhh,’ ” said the 15-year-old from Chino. “I thought, if a newspaper was here right now, I’d be an MVP.”’

A year ago, nobody was cheering. Tequillo said because of drug and alcohol problems, she would sleep every day until noon, missing her entire freshman year at her regular school.

Like most of the 76 students--ranging in age from 11 to 18--she was placed in this residential facility by her family for a therapy program that usually runs from nine to 15 months.

Once the students complete their programs, they return to their regular schools.

But until they do, many of them feel dumped by their parents, shunned by old friends, misunderstood.

“My family hates me,” one of them told a complete stranger recently.

“I have lost all my friends,” said another one.

In their hardened eyes, I could see they believed it.

Which is why Mark Hollis, the school’s only physical education teacher, had this crazy idea.

What better way to teach about real life than with sports?

So in the spring of 1997 he started a CIF-sanctioned program, with only baseball and softball at first.

The baseball team struggled so badly, by the end of games opponents were pitching for them.

The softball team lasted only one scrimmage before the rest of the season had to be canceled because of behavioral problems back at school.

But the next fall, Oak Grove began playing boys’ basketball. And this year the school has added girls’ volleyball and girls’ basketball.

“This is all very therapeutic,” Hollis said. “The idea of bringing normalcy to kids’ lives, getting away from the institute, interacting with kids their own age.

“What a lot of people take for granted, for these kids, it’s a big thing.”

And nothing has been bigger, or more difficult, than girls’ basketball.

When Pachot, 28, stood in front of the 14 girls who showed up for the first practice in the fall, he asked if any of them had played organized basketball.

Nobody raised her hand.

Then he asked if anybody knew how to dribble.

Nobody raised her hand.

So he slowly began bouncing a ball up and down, lesson one.

“This,” he said, “is dribbling.”

Having struggled for much of their young lives simply to be normal, extracurricular activities were foreign to these girls.

Basketball? Most had never even watched it.

Some of the girls showed up for that first practice in jeans. Others were wearing tennis shoes with no strings.

They work on half of an outdoor converted tennis court whose other half is occupied by the boys.

When it rains, they move into a giant shed and talk about how they would have practiced.

When they want to have full-court drills, Pachot awakens them at 6 a.m. for a workout before school.

Six girls quickly quit. The ones who stayed have become close.

“I used to hate everybody on this team, I used to want to kill them all,” Traverson said. “Now, we’re friends. We talk about the game. We laugh about the game.”

Even games like the 78-2 pounding at the hands of the Lake Arrowhead Christian varsity.

“Hey, I scored our two points,” Traverson said. “I really helped the team. It felt good.”

Not that losing is easy.

Johnson says she plays the entire game without looking at the scoreboard.

Others will get frustrated and ask to come out. They will sit on the end of the bench with their heads in their hands until the frustration has passed.

During halftime of the recent game against the California School for the Deaf, with the team trailing 25-6, one player even became physically ill.

But she started the second half.

After that game, like all other games, the players rode back to school in a giant van, eating munchies, swapping stories, dancing to rap music coming from the stereo.

By the time they arrived back at the dorm, most were weary, but happy.

Pachot, whose pregame speech challenges the players only to score more their school-record eight points a game, sticks around to counsel anyone who is sad they couldn’t.

He usually doesn’t have to stay long.

“Regardless of the outcome, they see themselves as winners,” said Dr. Michael Kitlowski, senior clinical coordinator at Oak Grove. “These are a lot of kids who, through the years, have been told they didn’t belong, couldn’t do this, couldn’t do that.

“‘Here is the opportunity to remind them that they do belong.”

Perhaps because the games are in the afternoon, and because the students come from all over the region, not one parent attended any of their first four games.

No support, no victories, and yet Pachot said he is planning on throwing them an awards banquet.

Well, OK, it will be only a speech at the spring graduation ceremonies.

“I am going to let them know that, for the rest of their lives, no matter what happens to them, this time they stuck it out,” he said. “Something was hard, but they stuck it out.”

The girls will be listening.

“We haven’t won a game, but, with our teamwork . . .” Crystal Traverson said. “We’re No. 1.”

Lots of players say that lots of times while running off the court during lots of basketball seasons.

This sounded better than any of them.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com