CVC's Sanborn is girls softball coach of the year

Orange County is a hotbed for softball.

Some of the top travel ball clubs in the nation are based in the county, so the quality of the players on high school teams is amazing. You can find an Orange County graduate just about every other at-bat while watching UCLA vs. Arizona in the Women's College World Series. (Click here to see the 2010 All-County softball team)

But not every team in the county is loaded with travel ball players. Capistrano Valley Christian has a student body of about 150, but there were no big-time softball players in the group.

Eagles coach Bruce Sanborn had to start from scratch. Some of his players had limited "rec ball" experience, but a number of them had never even played softball until they entered high school and signed up for tryouts.

That's what makes what Sanborn did at CVC this season unique. Sanborn guided the Eagles to their first San Joaquin League title since the team won a league championship in 2000. The Eagles won a school-record 20 games. CVC made it all the way to the CIF-SS Division 7 semifinals – another first for the Eagles – before losing to eventual champion Kern Valley of Lake Isabella.

Sanborn is the Register's 2010 softball Coach of the Year.

"Are you kidding me?" the self-effacing Sanborn said when he was informed he was receiving the honor. "You're not messing around with me?"

Sanborn created a very positive environment so his inexperienced girls weren't afraid to fail and were encouraged to keep learning. His philosophy starts with "have fun" and ends with "have fun." In between, there are life lessons to be learned. He hands each player a pamphlet with his philosophy at the beginning of each season.

"It really is a lot of fun," Sanborn said. "There really are no expectations. I come from a background of coaching tennis. I sort of treat each one of them individually.

"First of all, they find out that I care about them a lot. That's one of the secrets. If they understand you really care about them and you want to see them improve, then they buy into it and they really go for it and put out their best effort."

A lot of coaches could learn a few things from Sanborn about team bonding. Sanborn took the team on a trip to San Luis Obispo in April. He wanted the girls to get a chance to see Capri Ruiz, a former CVC standout now playing for Cal Poly SLO, and to see a college game.

But he also wanted to develop some team unity. They went to the movies and went out to eat together. They also went hiking through the morros.

"We took them on this hike," Sanborn said. "We got the whole team going up to the top of this volcanic morron thing. We've done it two years in a row. ... This time, it was Sunday morning, so we actually went up and had our own church service up on the trail. We just sat down in the middle of the trail.

"All these Sunday hikers, people going up and back and walking right through us and here we were having the kids read from the Bible. There's nothing unorthodox or bizarre, but I think they looked at it later and thought that was a pretty neat thing."