DAILY PILOT HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETE OF THE WEEK:

Corona del Mar High junior Kate Baldoni usually prefers to let her play do the talking.

In fact, communicating more with her teammates is one of the things Coach Aaron Chaney is working on with the goalie for the CdM girls’ water polo team.

But there Baldoni was on Jan. 12, right before the fourth quarter in the Santa Barbara Tournament of Champions title game against Back Bay rival Newport Harbor. CdM was rallying, and Baldoni and a few teammates were urging the Sea Kings to keep going.

“Right before the fourth quarter of that Newport game when we were lining up, she was out [of the water] to almost her stomach,” Chaney said. “She was looking to her right and her left to tell the girls, ‘Come on! We’re going to do this!’ She was just getting people going in that game.”

CdM won the tournament after topping the Sailors in overtime, 6-5, holding Newport Harbor scoreless for the final 21-plus minutes of the contest. Baldoni was named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player.

The player who her teammates and coach call by her initials, “KB,” wasn’t toying around. She helped lead a scrappy defensive effort for the team now ranked No. 2 in the CIF Southern Section Division I coaches’ poll.

In the four TOC games, Corona del Mar held its opponents to three second-half goals. It allowed the Sea Kings to come back from a three-goal halftime deficit in both the quarterfinal and final of the tournament.

“We wanted it,” said Baldoni, the Daily Pilot Athlete of the Week. “I felt like the second half was our game. In the Laguna Beach game and the Newport game, we were down and we came out harder. I guess it was just our desire to win. It was a team effort.”

Baldoni has been steady in goal for CdM (12-5) this season, starting every game while making 154 saves, just over nine per game. But even when things weren’t necessarily going the Sea Kings’ way — they were just 5-5 after finishing fourth in the Holiday Cup — Baldoni is one player who wouldn’t stay down.

“She holds herself to a standard,” Chaney said. “When a goal gets scored on her, she gets upset with herself for a few seconds. You can see it, and then she’s over it. She doesn’t dwell on it, which is great. That’s what you want kids to do, to be able to evaluate themselves and then move on. ‘KB’ does a good job of evaluating what she could have done better in that situation, but then she moves on.”

Baldoni, who has been on the USA national cadet training team and will try out for the junior squad, nearly started for CdM last year as well. Chaney was going back and forth between Baldoni and senior Kate Murphy, now at UC Santa Barbara, until a couple of games into the season. He ultimately decided on Murphy as the starter.

But, because the Sea Kings dominated many of their games, Baldoni still saw more action than a typical backup. She appeared in 18 of CdM’s 34 games.

“It was a really good experience playing up at that level,” Baldoni said. “I knew I still had a lot of work to do. I had to keep working hard because I knew that [Murphy] graduated, I’d have to step up and take her spot.”

It happened sooner than she thought — in last February’s CIF Southern Section Division I semifinal against Montebello to be exact. Chaney, unhappy with his team giving up seven goals in the first half, inserted Baldoni in goal for the second half.

Baldoni allowed just one goal in that second half, giving CdM a chance in what eventually ended up as an 8-7 loss.

“Pretty tough position to be in, being the backup goalie all year and then all of the sudden in the semifinals of CIF the coach says, ‘You’re in.’ ” Chaney said. “But the reason I felt comfortable putting her in is that she’s a gamer. She rises to the occasion in games. She’s really tough mentally in that sense; she exudes a lot of confidence. She has high expectations for herself, and that’s what makes her as good as she is. Having that self-confidence gave me confidence to put her in the second half of that game.”

Baldoni has been playing water polo since the sixth grade. She said she started the sport after seeing how much fun her older brother, R.J., was having in the CdM junior program coached by Ted Bandaruk. R.J. Baldoni, a second-team All-Pacific Coast League pick in 2006 for the Sea Kings boys’ team, is a redshirt freshman at UC Irvine.

Kate Baldoni, who also played soccer, volleyball and softball growing up, now just sticks to water polo and swimming. Her favorite part about playing water polo?

“I love my team,” she said. “That’s definitely my favorite part. I guess I like being in the water, too, because we don’t sweat.”

Less sweat for Chaney having Baldoni back there, for sure. The CdM coach remembers when he played on the UC Santa Barbara men’s team that won the NCAA championship in 1979. Craig Wilson, who went on to play for the United States’ silver medal-winning Olympics teams of 1984 and ’88, was the Gauchos’ goalie that year.

“I tried to explain it to the girls how important it is to have a good goalie,” Chaney said. “You shouldn’t even turn to look at the shot; you should just take off on the counterattack. When you’re on defense, you can take chances, you can play up in the lanes a little more because maybe if your guy beats you, you know [the goalie] will be back helping you to block the shot.

“It’s such a luxury to have a goalie like her.”

Baldoni, meanwhile, said she’s just happy to be a part of the team.

“I think every little practice counts,” she said of CdM’s seven-game winning streak heading into today’s game against Foothill at Beckman High. “From where we were during the summer to now, we’re a totally different team. We’ve come a long way, but we still have to keep working hard if we want to keep winning.”

Expect her to keep up her end of that bargain.

MATT SZABO may be reached at (714) 966-4614 or by e-mail at matthew.szabo@latimes.com.