Water Polo Coach Has ‘World’s Best’ Experience in Her Favor : Colleges: Former player and coach at Wilson High relishes the challenge of turning around a languishing program.

Fighting off the effects of stifling early autumn heat, Maureen Mendoza trudged up a steep asphalt path toward the cafeteria at Rio Hondo College, where she is trying to build a more competitive water polo program.

Mendoza, 30, has been selected the world’s best female water polo player six times. She began playing on the boys’ team at Wilson High School in Long Beach in 1976, and now is a member of the women’s national water polo team.

She relishes the prospect of turning around the program at Rio Hondo, which has not been known as a community college power. “I like challenges. We will get better and better,” said the first-year coach, whose team returns only one of last year’s players.

In community college water polo, the so-called “beach schools” such as Long Beach City College, Orange Coast and Golden West have dominated for years, with landlocked colleges playing second fiddle. Rio Hondo, in the Puente Hills near Whittier, has never been a pool powerhouse, yet Mendoza says the Roadrunners will contend for the Foothill Conference title, perhaps as soon as next season.

The team, 7-3 so far, plays host to Cerritos College at 3:30 this afternoon.

“That’s a hard job for Maureen to build,” said Sandy Nitta, coach of the women’s national team, who was the Roadrunners’ interim coach last season. “But what she is doing in that program in less than a year is pretty amazing.”

Mendoza, who had been the boys’ water polo and girls’ swimming coach at Wilson, was enticed to Rio Hondo last spring by Ellie Bewley, the dean of physical education. The hiring was considered a coup.

Bewley said she wanted a coach who would be “very ethical, very professional. I talked to everybody and anybody in water polo circles in the world . . . and (their) opinion is that we couldn’t have hired anyone better.”

Mendoza began swimming with the old Phillips 66 Swim Club at Silverado Park in Long Beach at age 7 under her maiden name, Maureen O’Toole. By the time she got to high school in 1976, she had grown to 5-foot-10 and hoped to play a team sport.

“To this day I sometimes wish that I could have played volleyball,” she said. “I never made it to the Olympics as a swimmer or in water polo. Maybe in volleyball I could have.”

But O’Toole never went out for the team because of a personality conflict with the Wilson volleyball coach. Instead, she approached sophomore water polo Coach Bob Gruneisen about a tryout for the boys’ water polo team.

“She was obviously so talented--more talented than most of the boys at that level,” said Gruneisen, who is still at Wilson.

O’Toole excelled at the two-meter position, akin to the center position in basketball.

She joined the women’s national team in 1977, but continued playing at Wilson, where in 1978 she and goalie Becky Black became two of the first girls in CIF Southern Section history to start on a boys’ varsity team. Wilson, ranked No. 1 in the 4A Division most of the season, lost in the quarterfinals of the playoffs to Chaffey.

A year later, O’Toole and Black played at top-ranked Long Beach City College but were banned from the playoffs by state officials, who feared they might be hurt.

Angered by the move, O’Toole, who was also top-rated in the breaststroke, left LBCC and accepted a swimming scholarship to USC. But after only one season she quit to take a trip around the world, during which she conducted water polo clinics in various countries to help pay the bills.

USC did not extend her swimming scholarship, so when she came home in 1982, O’Toole transferred to the University of Hawaii. As a senior in 1985 she was on relay teams that placed third and fourth in the NCAA finals.

O’Toole married former Cal State Long Beach football player Jim Mendoza in 1987.

Women’s water polo attracts little attention in the United States, although internationally it is well received. Holland is considered the world’s best team, having won the World Championship and World Cup tournaments last year. Although the United States finished third in both events, Mendoza remains largely unknown in this country.

Mendoza credits training against men as a key to her longevity and success.

“When you play with boys, obviously, they are stronger than females, so you have to anticipate things and be smarter than them,” she said. “You have to think ahead to what will happen next before they do.”

Gruneisen saw potential in Mendoza early on.

“You see an athlete who is two or three steps ahead of the game, one who anticipates. She was wonderful at that,” he said. “That is what made her such a good woman player against boys. No matter how strong the boys were, they were not going to beat her.”

Although outwardly composed, Mendoza is intense, friends and observers say.

Bewley, for example, said: “She is the most competitive person I have met.”

Seated on a bench on the concrete pool deck at Rio Hondo last week, Mendoza wore a hat to escape the blazing sun. Her long blonde hair was tied back with a red band. In a tired voice, she held a practice for 14 male players.

“How could you not like playing for her?” asked Carlos De La Barra, a freshman from Pioneer High in Whittier. “She is one of the best water polo players in the world, and she’s trying to pass on what she knows.”

Mendoza stood and walked the length of the pool, preaching to her players the same philosophy she had developed when she started against boys. Anticipate and be smart, she told them, and you will succeed.