The gym is rocking. Will be for the next hour or so.
Frankie Perales stands on one side of the volleyball court, serving lob after lob to the liberos. Lauga Gauta and other springy outside hitters soar for balls lofted perfectly by spry setters. Sive’a Gauta, 6-foot-3, and other towering middle blockers leap up. Junior varsity girls shag loose balls.
Every rotation in this Wednesday afternoon practice drill has the urgency of a postseason point. Girls are shouting, moving with purpose. Perales is doing minimal coaching. Everyone knows what to do.
Garden Grove High’s girls volleyball team takes nothing for granted these days, if only because it never expected to be undefeated this late in the season.
“These girls just want to win,” said Perales, in his fourth year at the helm. “They don’t just want to make the playoffs. They want to go all the way.”
“Attitude” is the word Lauga Gauta says best describes the personality of this year’s team. Teammate Lana Masoe agrees, as does Perales.
Gauta is a senior and the program’s lone club volleyball player, likely the returning letterman most impacted this summer by the graduation of nine seniors from a strong 2013 team. Masoe is a senior, too, but didn’t play last season.
Gauta said it took time for this year’s outfit to jell, for the upperclassmen to see their new teammates as equals and not just first-year varsity players. Sive’a Gauta, a sophomore and Lauga’s younger sister, described the weeks leading up to the season as “rough” and “scrappy” with a lot of “back and forth” between teammates.
Nobody on the team knew how to deal with change, Sive’a Gauta surmised.
Perales and his coaching staff saw that adversity as a strength. The seniors so dearly wanted to win, Perales thought, that their intensity petrified the underclassmen. Time and a little motivating on his part would smoothe the summer transition.
“None of us liked each other at the beginning of the season,” Lauga Gauta said. “We were all so new, and everyone had to adapt to the way we played.
“Now all we care about are our sisters and bonding, and having as much chemistry as we need to go to CIF and win CIF.”
Garden Grove opened the season Sept. 3, falling two sets behind small-school power Crean Lutheran High before winning three straight to take the match.
Perales points to that afternoon as the moment he realized how his girls would rise to future challenges. Garden Grove ripped through its preseason slate, finishing the month, 10-0, with half of those wins coming by way of a sweep.
Unranked in the Division 4AA preseason poll, Garden Grove leaped to seventh the first week of October. Perales felt his troupe began its Garden Grove League schedule that week playing its best volleyball of the season. With two matches remaining, Garden Grove is ranked fourth.
“This year, I knew we were going to smash everything,” said Masoe, one of the county’s leading middle hitters. “We have a lot of talent over here. We have players that have a desire to play for a CIF championship. They’re not just shooting for league champions, they want more than that.”
Not too long ago, another Garden Grove volleyball team turned heads with its play.
Perales’ boys team spent the entirety of last spring ranked highly in Division 5, parlaying an undefeated league championship into the No. 2 seed in the playoffs. Though Garden Grove lost the division’s championship match, 3-0, to top-seeded Saddleback Valley Christian High, seeds of success were sown for its girls doppelganger.
Perales said his girls roster resembles his boys roster in more ways than one, claiming: “I could match every one of my girls with a boys player.”
Gauta said the momentum from the boys’ run last season “carried on” to this season. Masoe is the younger sister of former Argonaut Sione Masoe, a team captain of Perales’ in the spring.
“We wanted to go (as far as the boys) this year,” Gauta said. “We knew we were going to be a better team, and we wanted to fight more because we were equipped with better people. A lot of girls this year, they have fire. They want to win.”
Two full seasons have passed since Garden Grove last captured a league championship.
The program won four straight titles from 2006 to ’09, but Bolsa Grande High and La Quinta High later took turns finishing atop the standings.
Even so, Perales cannot recall in his 16 years coaching in the district a team being ranked as highly in its division as his girls are now.
“Being undefeated is hard,” he said. “Even the best teams suffer losses. We have a chance to make history at this school. These girls don’t want to lose.”
Contact the writer: 714-704-3790 or bwhitehead@ocregister.com
