ON-THE-JOB TRAINING : Rookies McPeak and Fontana Are Becoming a Force on Beach

Holly McPeak and Barbara Fontana make up the shortest, scrappiest and youngest team on the Women’s Professional Volleyball Assn. tour. The Manhattan Beach natives made their pro debut this year with different partners, but on April 27 they teamed up and soon earned the nickname “sand fleas.”

“They call us that because we dig all the balls and we always keep coming back for more,” said McPeak, a former all-league and All-CIF setter at Mira Costa High.

Fontana and McPeak are seeded eighth in the 32-team field that will compete this weekend in the Manhattan Beach Open. Matches start at 9 a.m. on Saturday and the final is scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Sunday, adjacent to the Manhattan Beach Pier.

McPeak (5 foot 7) and Fontana (5-8) are considerably shorter than most of their opponents, but that has helped them become a crowd favorite.

“People always give us good support even on the road because we’re little and we’re young,” McPeak said. “But it’s always nice to play with a hometown crowd behind us.”

In college, McPeak, 22, was a standout setter at Cal and UCLA. She was an All-Pacific 10 Conference selection on UCLA’s 1991 NCAA national championship team and set a Bruin single-match assist record (97).

After earning all-state, All-CIF and all-league honors at Mira Costa, Fontana, 25, went on to become an outside hitter at Stanford from 1984 to 1987. She also was the captain of the gold medal West team at the 1985 U.S. Olympic Sports Festival.

Although height was never a factor in either woman’s high school or collegiate career, it has become a problem in beach competition.

“Now it creates a problem because a lot of the teams are big hitters,” McPeak said.

The two rookies have compensated by utilizing their quickness to play solid defense and control the ball. They also are among the best serving teams on the beach.

“When you’re on the beach and you only have two people, it’s not always a power game,” said Dea Lea Aldrich, who coached Fontana and McPeak at Mira Costa. “They’re both very competitive and stable players. Here you have two athletes that played on CIF championship teams and top college teams. When you have that kind of experience it doesn’t matter where you play.”

In 11 years, Aldrich has led Mira Costa to three state championships, two No. 1 national rankings and nine CIF titles. She also trains some of the WPVA’s top players such as Elaine Roque and Nina Matthies and travels to most beach tournaments. She says in a couple of years McPeak and Fontana should be at the top of the WPVA rankings.

“They’re winners with a great future outlook,” Aldrich said. “They’ve already gained the respect of the people in the WPVA. They’ve surprised them all.”

Patty Dodd, a UCLA All-American and a successful pro beach player, says McPeak and Fontana have come a long way in their short beach volleyball careers.

“If they were taller they’d be very dangerous,” Dodd said.

The team hustles on every point, often diving for a ball or sprinting into the crowd to retrieve a shot. The team also spends five to six hours daily working out.

“They’re scramblers. They’re small, but they are quick,” Aldrich said. “And they’re used to the pressure.”

McPeak and Fontana finished fourth at Salt Lake City and fifth at Fresno and Phoenix. They have never finished lower than ninth. On June 1-2 they participated in the Reno Shootout, a highly regarded invitational tournament that includes the WPVA’s top eight teams. McPeak and Fontana placed sixth in the round-robin event.

At last week’s Santa Cruz Open they fought hard before losing, 16-14, to the top-ranked team of Angela Rock and Karolyn Kirby.

McPeak has won $6,835 in prize money this year and Fontana $7,010.

“They’re not the best at anything, but they’re good at everything,” said Matthies, who has been ranked among the WPVA’s top five players since the organization was formed in 1987.

Earlier this week, McPeak and Fontana impressed veterans Jackie Silva and Rita Crockett-Royster during an intense, two-hour practice at Marine Street in Manhattan Beach.

“God, you guys are digging the hell out of everything!” Crockett-Royster said during a changeover.

Crockett-Royster was a silver medalist on the 1984 U.S. Olympic volleyball team. She teamed with Silva, the winningest player in WPVA history, to win the 1989 World Championships in Santa Monica.

The rookies beat Silva and Crockett-Royster, 15-10, but lost the second and third games by 15-11 scores. But it was a satisfying afternoon for McPeak and Fontana, considering Silva and Crockett-Royster had placed second at the Santa Cruz Open the previous weekend.

“We love playing defense and we have great chemistry together,” said Fontana, who recently graduated from law school and will take the California Bar exam in February. “We’re always aggressive. We always go all out because we’re not afraid of anybody.”

Said McPeak: “We like to fight. We always play hard and we never give up, but we still have so much to learn, like lots of strategic things. We learn so much every weekend.”

Both players say they’ve progressed since their first tournament, a event they entered without having practiced together.

“We’ve improved everything,” Fontana said. “All of our skills have skyrocketed. Even our ball control is so much better now. We’re just learning as we go along and it’s working.”