Southern Section Water Polo : Los Alamitos to Take a Fresh Shot at El Dorado

The fact that Los Alamitos High School will be in the Southern Section 3-A water polo final tonight against Empire League rival El Dorado says a lot about symmetry and anonymity.

In the past three seasons, Los Alamitos placed second in league behind El Dorado. In the past two seasons, El Dorado has gained a measure of fame in Orange County by winning back-to-back 3-A championships, while the boys from Los Alamitos have struggled just to convince the people on campus that they existed.

That’s no small feat at Los Alamitos, where the championship cheerleading squad has almost as many members (60) as the league champion football team (71), and the award-winning marching band and accompanying Broadway road show is 175 strong.

At this school, 18 guys floating in a pool and taking second-- second --every year tend to get as much attention as the cafeteria’s vegetable of the day.

“You can kind of get lost in the shuffle on the this campus,” said Dennis Ploessel, Los Alamitos coach. “There’s so many kids on so many teams and so much success.”

Well, success came to the Los Alamitos water polo team this season. The Griffins (27-5) won the Empire League championship, finally beating El Dorado for the title.

Los Alamitos was seeded second in the playoffs and beat Riverside Poly, 8-7, in the semifinals to earn a spot in today’s final at 5:30 p.m. at Belmont Plaza Pool in Long Beach. As the Griffins advanced through the playoffs, the interest at home was almost . . . well, it was almost.

“I wouldn’t say we’ve gained a following,” said Kevin McIntyre, one of the Griffins’ leading scorers. “But at least people seem a bit interested now.”

Some things don’t change so quickly. In fact, the day after the victory over Riverside Poly, two Orange County papers listed El Dorado as playing San Clemente in the final. El Dorado had beaten San Clemente in the semifinals.

“It was only fitting,” Ploessel said. “It’s gone like that for us for so long. It seemed only right that the day we make it to the big time, something like that happens.”

The reason for the Griffins’ success this season may have a lot to do with the way Ploessel has used his players. He has used a lot of them, usually 11 or 12 a game.

Ploessel substitutes three players after the first goal of every game. He substitutes players when they look tired, or if they just happen to catch his eye.

“When there’s a break in the game and he starts looking for people to take out, I go under water,” McIntyre said. “I hold my breath as long as I can and hope he missed me when I come back up.”

The number of substitutions keeps fresh players in the pool and allows Los Alamitos to counterattack. A counterattack in water polo is like the fast break in basketball. An opponent misses a shot, and you get the ball, move it down as quickly as possible and look for a shot against an overmatched defense still in transition.

“To play that kind of game, you’ve got to have fresh kids,” Ploessel said. “We don’t necessarily have the fastest swimmers, so I have to make sure they’re rested.”

But with so many players sharing playing time, no individual has had the chance to make headlines. Consider that most top teams have at least one scorer with 60 to 70 goals and then look at Los Alamitos, whose top goal-scorer, Tom Anderson, has 51, followed closely by Jon Wimbish (46), John Chomin (45) and Jeff Wimbish (43).

In one game against Katella this season, 16 players scored.

“It’s very unusual for us to have one guy score three goals,” Ploessel said. “We kind of share the wealth. Of course, that may have something to do with people not noticing us. We don’t have a stats superstar that everyone can zero in on.”

Ploessel’s extensive use of substitutes has not been a tradition in his nine years at Los Alamitos. For a couple of years, he was using only seven or eight players a game.

“If I went to nine, we were in trouble,” he said.

Four years ago, Jack Perisho, now a Los Alamitos assistant, scored more than 90 goals.

But this is a team with 10 seniors with similar backgrounds in water polo, which means that all 10 had no background in the sport.

Jon and Jeff Wimbish, identical twins and Empire League co-players of the year, had one summer of recreation swimming behind them before they got to Los Alamitos. McIntyre was the same.

“Most of the kids on the team now were good athletes when they got to the school,” Ploessel said. “They just weren’t great in anything. We asked them to give water polo a try.”

According to McIntyre, the request came with a selling point.

“They said that we’d always have a tan, that girls would be hanging around all the time and that we would be famous,” McIntyre said. “Well, at least they were right about the tan.”

Costa Mesa, the No. 1-seeded team, will attempt to win its second straight 2-A championship when it plays Harvard at Belmont Plaza Pool at 4 p.m.

The 5-A championship between perennial powers and Sea View League rivals Newport Harbor and Corona del Mar is scheduled for 8:45 p.m. at Belmont Plaza.