Waterproof

Girls’ water polo is only in its third season as a Southern Section championship sport, but a dynasty already appears to be in the making.

Bell Gardens won the Division III title and finished 30-0 last season. The Lancers are 16-0 this season with a team that has only one senior.

“There should be a division for Bell Gardens and then Division I,” Fullerton Rosary Coach Todd Sprague said earlier this season. “They are in a class by themselves.”

Bell Gardens might be working on something approaching a 70-game winning streak had the Lancers competed in the inaugural 1998 season. But several girls, including U.S. national team member Brenda Villa, played for the boys’ team during the fall of that school year, making the school ineligible to field a girls’ team.

Villa is part of a tradition of outstanding female players who participated at Bell Gardens after learning the game under Coach Gabriel Martinez at the Commerce Aquatic Center in the city of Commerce. The center has sponsored age-group swimming and water polo teams almost from the day it opened in 1960.

Four players on this year’s team--junior Sheetal Narsai and sophomores Patty Cardenas, Alex Morales and Viviana Morales--are in the U.S. junior national developmental program.

All would like to follow in the path of players such as Villa, who attends Stanford. Or Jessica Lopez and Jackie Lopez, unrelated standouts from last year’s girls’ championship team who earned scholarships to UCLA and San Diego State, respectively.

“They’re my idols,” said Cardenas, who was swimming at age 3 and playing water polo by 5. “I want to go as far as they did when it comes to school and water polo.”

Said Narsai: “I want to use water polo as a steppingstone. We know it’s going to be a big thing in our lives, and it can take us practically anywhere we want to go, especially if we have the grades.”

Not a problem.

Bell Gardens Coach Bob Greenamyer said several players have 4.0 grade-point averages and most others are near 3.6.

The Lancers’ mix of intelligence and experience makes for what has proved to be an unbeatable combination.

“Their knowledge of the game is so deep,” Burbank Burroughs Coach Rey Rivera said. “They have learned so much from such a young age, there is just an innate respect for the game.

“And if you’re learning the tactical part of the game at the same time you’re learning the skills, it’s just a matter of refining those skills once you get to high school. Most high school coaches have their hands full trying to impart all three of those things to their players at once.”

Greenamyer, in his 20th year coaching water polo at Bell Gardens, said experience and intelligence are not the only factors that set his players apart.

“The kids from this area are tougher than other kids,” Greenamyer said. “They don’t have the resources that kids in other areas have to go do other things all the time. They play water polo, and they dedicate themselves to put in the time to become good at it.”

Hours spent together in the pool and during trips to games and tournaments over the years have helped the players develop friendships as well as good skills. Few if any of the girls that come out for the Bell Gardens team at the start of the season are strangers.

“We’re like sisters,” junior Melissa Madrid said. “We fight sometimes, but the next minute we’re joking. We talk a lot about how much we want to win.”

Despite the success they are enjoying this season, the Bell Gardens players are not satisfied with their recent play. Last week, they defeated Division I title contender Long Beach Wilson and La Jolla Bishop’s in the last two rounds of a tournament. On Tuesday, they improved to 4-0 in the Almont League with a victory over Burroughs.

“When we get in the water at the start of games, we see fear in the other teams’ eyes, but we also see vengeance because a lot of people want to beat us,” Narsai said. “When we play a team that is not as experienced, we drop to another level.

“We cannot do that if we want to keep winning. All the teams are getting better and the whole sport is going to get better and better every year.

“But when we play our game we are pretty hard to beat.”

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Staff writer Michael Itagaki contributed to this story.