Oak Park, Littlerock Also Have Twin Powers : Basketball: Valavanis and Lewis girls are double trouble for opponents in the backcourt.

Alisha and Alexa Valavanis are excellent students.

Alisha has a 4.0 grade-point average, while Alexa’s is 3.8. The Oak Park High girls’ basketball players clearly have a head start when it comes to the subject of multiplication.

Alisha and Alexa, 18, are twins, the first of two identical sets born to the Valavanis family. Sisters Katelyn and Kyleigh are 3.

“They do seem to come in twos,” said Alisha, also Oak Park’s student body president and homecoming queen. “When we’re with the other twins, there’s quite a bit of questions.”

Few have questioned the Valavanises’ importance to the Oak Park program. The seniors have made up the Eagle starting backcourt since their freshman season.

“They had a good head start, experience-wise,” Oak Park Coach Kim Galbreath said.

Eight years ago, the Valavanis family moved to California from basketball-crazed Indiana, where Alisha and Alexa played in organized boys’ leagues for five years.

They continued to play in boys’ leagues after the move, their first organized experience against girls coming only after they enrolled at Oak Park.

The transition was smooth.

Alisha, a 5-foot-4 shooting guard, is averaging 16 points this season, while Alexa, the point guard, averages 11 points, four assists and four steals for an Oak Park team that is 13-7 overall and a game behind La Reina and Fillmore, who are tied for first place in the Tri-Valley League.

Oak Park opponents are not the only ones seeing double, however.

Jackie and Jenny Lewis of Littlerock are also 5-4 identical twins who are in their fourth varsity seasons.

“I still can’t tell them apart,” said first-year Coach Tom Hegre. “Sometimes I scrimmage with the girls and, when I have to cover one of them and don’t know which number is which, it’s bad news for our defense.”

Both were All-Golden League guards as juniors and have helped the Lobos to an 11-8 record this season.

“They have given a lot of people headaches this year,” Hegre said.

That’s not surprising, considering headaches sometimes accompany double vision.