Persistence Pays Off for the Turcios Family

Luis Turcios was 7 and sitting on his mother’s lap in El Salvador in 1983. Her arms were wrapped around his shoulders, and she was crying.

“I’ll be back next month,” she promised.

Next month turned into a year, then three years, then five.

Turcios’ mother had left her husband, son and five daughters to become a domestic worker in Beverly Hills, hoping one day to reunite her family in America.

It took her eight years but ultimately the entire family joined her.

Turcios arrived in 1991, as a 15-year-old, and enrolled at Beverly Hills High. He spoke no English.

He’s now 27, the boys’ basketball coach at Beverly Hills and an American citizen.

“Oh, man, I feel blessed to be here,” he said.

There’s something different about Turcios’ dedication and commitment to his players. Maybe it’s his sincerity and belief that he has found his calling.

“I could coach forever,” he said. “I tell the athletic director, the more I come to practice and see the kids’ reaction, the more I’m happy with the choices I made.”

Turcios was a 5-foot-9 soccer player when he arrived at Beverly Hills. Everything was new and overwhelming.

He’d play a game while walking home. He’d stop at a park and wait until he saw five Rolls-Royces go by.

“It would be five minutes,” he said. “OK, I have to go home.”

He didn’t play basketball until his sophomore year, graduated as an honors student, then became a top shooting guard at West L.A. College and Whittier College. He returned as an assistant coach at Beverly Hills and spent last year as a volunteer assistant at Indiana University under Coach Mike Davis.

“I learned how little I knew about basketball,” he said. “I learned about offense, defense, fundamentals, videos. Their work ethic was ridiculous, from the first assistant, to the head coach, to the manager.”

In his first season as head coach at Beverly Hills, Turcios has already orchestrated a dramatic turnaround, taking a team that was 0-10 in the Pioneer League last season and getting it off to a 4-0 start. Now they’re 5-3.

“I try to put them in spots,” he said. “They have to be accountable for what they do. We had a 7 a.m. practice. We’re winning and I don’t want the kids to let up. Having a 7 o’clock practice, they had to sacrifice a little bit, just to remind them we haven’t accomplished anything.

“They’re believing what I’m trying to teach, which is strictly fundamentals. I told the kids the first day of practice, I want them to be the best passing, the best rebounding, the best defensive team in league, and they’re buying into it.”

Turcios receives a small stipend for coaching the team, but it’s his only income other than directing a summer camp. He’s taking college classes so he can start teaching in the fall.

First-year Principal Dan Stepenosky was thrilled to hire Turcios because of his alumnus credentials and his attention to detail.

“When I saw him working and conditioning the kids, I knew we had a winner,” Stepenosky said.

If the players want to thank someone for having Turcios in their life, his mother, Etelviana, deserves consideration. Her decision to leave her family in the middle of a 12-year civil war in El Salvador for the sake of a better future for her children serves as a powerful example of the choices parents sometimes must make.

“At first, I didn’t understand,” Turcios said. “The more I see her, the more I understand. She gave up a lot in order for us to have what we have. She sacrificed. She gave up seeing her kids for eight years. She had a dream and was going to work toward it.”

Among the Turcios children, one is a doctor, one is a teacher, two are trying to become teachers, one is studying business and another is studying real estate. Their father works for a dental company.

None of it would have been possible without the determination of Turcios’ mother.

“My mother is still alive and still living with the same lady in Beverly Hills,” he said.

It’s a storybook ending.

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Eric Sondheimer can be reached at eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.