‘Los Al Way’ Leads Women to Olympic Medal

It was Orange County versus Waltzing Matilda Saturday night at the Sydney Aquatic Center. The United States against Australia in the first Olympic gold medal women’s water polo match.

The U.S. team has trained for two years at an old Navy pool at Los Alamitos. From early morning workouts, late afternoon workouts, nighttime workouts, from running on Huntington Beach, from bonding sessions among women who had left friends and family behind for two years to live and breathe and train water polo at Los Alamitos, came a most enchanting group of pioneers.

From being longshots to qualify for the Olympics, the U.S. women got a silver medal. The Aussies scored with less than two seconds left for the 4-3 victory.

The winning goal caused some controversy. The Americans believed it was scored on an illegal play. They could barely contain their tears during the award ceremony.

Goalie Bernice Orwig was still sobbing an hour afterward. Orwig, who grew up in Anaheim and graduated from USC, blamed herself for the loss and that’s too bad.

For this team and its pool may have started something special.

“The way we play,” Coach Guy Baker said, “we call that the Los Al style.”

Baker remembers the first women’s water polo tournament that was held at the Los Alamitos pool.

It was in December of 1998. A tornado had blown through the night before. When Baker arrived to get ready for the tournament, the pool was filled with a blown-down fence. The water temperature was 60. The temporary bleachers were in pieces.

But it didn’t matter.

The pool was home.

This fledgling collection of college kids, mothers, teachers, coaches held close to their hearts a secret dream.

“The pool at Los Alamitos was the start of it all,” Baker said Saturday night. “We didn’t have to keep our suits and caps and robes and towels in the trunk of the car any more. We could have a locker. We could have a home.

“Because of that pool at Los Alamitos, whenever I need to fire the girls up I just have to say one thing. I say, ‘Let’s go out and play the Los Al way.’ And that’s what they do.”

“We had a place to call our own,” Julie Swail said. “You can’t begin to know how important that was to us. That pool, you could say that pool raised Olympians. And no matter what happened tonight, you can never take away the fact that we were in the first Olympics for our sport. We wouldn’t have made it without that pool.”

Swail, the U.S. captain, grew up in Placentia and is the coach of the new women’s water polo program at UC Irvine. Robin Beauregard, a defender, is from Huntington Beach. This trio of Orange Countians welcomed the rest of the team as they gathered in Los Alamitos. They helped the others find apartments, find friends, find restaurants, find the best secret ways to travel Orange County streets.

“I think everybody on our team thinks of Los Alamitos as a little bit of home,” Beauregard said. “We were welcomed in the community and never made to feel we were intruding.

“We could train when we needed to. We could have tournaments and people came to see [us]. Do you know how good it felt to have 2,000 fans at the tournament in July?”

All six Olympic teams gathered at Los Al in July. The stands were packed, the cheers loud. Little girls begged for autographs from the players who suddenly were heroes.

“That was wild,” Swail said. “And that was just a tiny taste of what the Olympics were like.”

Once again Orange County has nurtured female athletes.

Last summer U.S. soccer star Julie Foudy said how lucky she was to have grown up in Mission Viejo, in a place where girls were not just grudgingly accepted as athletes, they were encouraged as athletes.

Swail and Beauregard never had a problem being welcomed on boys’ teams when there wasn’t a girls’ water polo team to join.

” “The fight wasn’t getting the chance to play the game when I was growing up,” Swail said. “The fight was to play the game in the Olympics.”

But in a minute Swail was looking ahead. She is excited about her new program at UC Irvine. And she knows the sport is going forward.

“We’ve got that great home and new players will be coming to Los Al,” Swail said.

“The Los Al way will live on,” Baker said. “But these girls will always be the first.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached via e-mail at diane.pucin@latimes.com.