Basic Training

There was no spirited chorus being sung to a military cadence as Yessenia Reyes and her Riverside Poly teammates were put through their paces during preseason workouts, unless you counted a collective refrain of nervous giggling, grumbling and grousing.

Almost before they had a chance to wonder what was going on and what they were in for, the players were taking 1 1/2-mile jaunts around school property, spending 45-minute intervals on each drill, and enduring practice sessions that could drag on for 2 1/2 hours or more.

“We weren’t used to hard work. We practiced more than usual and everything was faster and harder,” Reyes said. “We crack jokes all the time about how we’re ready for the Army now.”

Any laughter is muted, though, because the Bears have learned first-hand that Rusty Bailey wasn’t kidding when the 1994 West Point graduate, U.S. Army captain and first-year coach introduced his girls’ soccer team to basic training, Riverside Poly-style.

“It was from the first day,” Reyes said. “He came out with the attitude that we were going to work hard, that the conditioning was going to help us win games, and that we were going to achieve our goals.”

The payoff has come in a successful season that no one could have been sure of when Bailey, a 1990 graduate of Riverside Poly, returned to his hometown. His father graduated from Riverside Poly in 1956 and Bailey’s grandfather graduated from the school in 1926.

Bailey was intent on serving his community in a way vastly different from how he served his country as a helicopter pilot in the Army. So he jumped at the opportunity to teach American government classes and coach at the school where he once served as student-body president under the guidance of class advisor Bob Ritzau, who is now Riverside Poly’s athletic director.

Riverside Poly, with an enrollment of about 2,500, opened in 1890 and is the oldest high school in the Riverside Unified School District. The school, originally located at the site of what is now Riverside Community College, moved to its Victoria Avenue location in 1965.

“I believe in serving my community and my country,” Bailey said. “I’d always thought teaching would be a good connection for me, and I wanted to do something where I could have an influence on people.”

He appears to have found his calling.

Riverside Poly’s third coach in three seasons, Bailey guided the Bears (22-1-1, 9-0-1) to the Ivy League championship -- their second in three seasons -- after a second-place finish last year.

The Bears, who have 15 shutouts, also won their tournament and the Riverside North tournament in December. Their loss was to Irvine Woodbridge, 1-0, on Dec. 11.

“Everybody I know has appreciated that we’re doing so well,” said Erin Rohac, a senior four-year starter at sweeper. “That can’t only be because of the team. The coach has something to do with it too.”

Although Bailey played high school soccer and then competed in a semipro league while based in Florida, teaching and coaching represented a major career change.

After spending three years on active duty in the Army and a year in the National Guard, Bailey served in the Presidential Management Internship program, a two-year postgraduate fellowship in Washington, where he worked one year in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and another for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Not that the transition has been easy for the players or their new coach.

Junior forward Leslie Rhodes received a yellow card in one game and cursed at a referee over the call as she left the field to serve the five-minute penalty.

She wound up on the bench for the rest of the game, ejected not by officials but by her coach.

“I feel like I learned from it,” Rhodes said. “He didn’t really yell or anything. He just said, ‘Put your warm-ups on,’ like I wasn’t going back in. I just sat the bench, and I was like, ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ ”

Rhodes told Bailey as much in an apology later that night. Her gesture made his day.

“You live for those kind of things, that feedback that tells you maybe you had an impact on somebody,” Bailey said. “When I came in, I think I had higher expectations than they had. I’m kind of a hard driver that way. I’ve been around excellence; that’s just my background.”

Still in the Army’s inactive reserves, Bailey, 30, remains eligible for a call to duty. As a conflict with Iraq looms large, he says he wouldn’t hesitate to serve if called.

“It’d be my duty, and I’m a firm believer in duty, honor, country,” he said, espousing military tenets he was first exposed to as the son of a U.S. Air Force staff sergeant and grandson of a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander.

Bailey, however, doesn’t expect a call-up and won’t volunteer for service at this point, saying, “I’ve got other priorities now.”

His team’s immediate objective is to advance to at least the semifinals of the Division II playoffs. It is a lofty goal for a school that won its only girls’ soccer championship in Division IV in 1994 and was eliminated in the second round of the Division II playoffs last year.

But then, the Bears have spent all season getting accustomed to higher standards.

“They’re the highest standards we’ve ever had from a coach,” Rohac said. “But they’re not unreasonable standards. They’re definitely not unreachable.”