DAILY PILOT HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETE OF THE WEEK:

Ryan Redding has to be ready to work on his handshake during baseball practice.

This one is more complicated than the one he’s used to being a part of the Estancia High program.

The exchanges he remembered the previous three years dealt with him lining up, then walking while holding his hand up to slap high-fives with the opposing team.

It came after a game, a time Redding more often than not had to congratulate the winning team.

So when Redding said first-year coach Matt Sorensen first stopped a practice before the season, yelling, “All right. You guys have 10 minutes to work on handshakes. Pick a partner,” Redding looked confused.

Celebrate? This was practice. Remember, Redding said he wasn’t used to the team praising itself.

“We were losing a lot,” he said, a good enough reason not to he thought.

But no one used the 10 minutes as a break. Sorensen forced every player to rehearse elaborate handshakes until they were as routine as a traditional right-handed one.

Redding teamed up with fellow senior Eddie Tomasek. The two childhood friends didn’t know what to do.

“It started off a little weak,” Redding said. “[We] watched a couple of videos on YouTube.com and picked out some things.”

Now the Redding-Tomasek exchange is as long as some of those clips on the popular video-sharing website.

Sorensen loves every minute of it, too.

Redding has played a vital role to the Eagles’ early season success with his hitting (.579 batting average, three triples), pitching (2.10 earned run average, 13 strikeouts in 10 innings) and base running (11 of 12 stolen bases).

Redding has been rejoicing with Tomasek a lot, quickly slapping hands, bumping forearms, saying any part of the body is fair game. The animated handshakes are part of Sorensen’s plan to instill confidence in players, build team moral, make baseball fun, all in hopes to turn Estancia (3-4) into a power.

Sooner rather than later in the Orange Coast League.

Big aspiration for sure. Redding, also a shortstop, believes it’s possible that the former Cal State Fullerton standout pitcher can take a last-place team in the Orange Coast League last season and transform it into a first-place one this season.

“They’re actually coaching us and you see great improvement,” said Redding, also crediting assistants, hitting coach Brandon Thompson and pitching coach Dan Ellis, former NCAA Division I players. “There’s a different attitude than there was last year out there. When [Sorensen] came out here, he completely changed everything, practice routine, working hard the whole off-season. It helped a lot [that he played at CSUF], because he knows what he’s talking about.

“He’s experienced [success by going 17-0 in 1990-00]. It’s nice to learn from a coach that knows what he’s talking about.”

Sorensen sounds like a coach who has won championships.

Someone reminded him before the season that his first high school job called for him to take over a program finishing 9-18, 3-9 in league in 2007, and missing the playoffs for the 15th straight season. None of that mattered to him. That’s the past.

What Sorensen has is 19 varsity players, because the school has no junior varsity and frosh/soph teams. One of the captains is the 6-foot-1, 181-pound Redding, a perfect guy for Sorensen to lead the way to revitalize the program.

“He’s got a lot of his mother in him. He’s a nurturing-type kid,” Sorensen said. “He wants to help [teammates] out.”

Being a leader is demanding, but the pressure is something Redding said he can’t succumb to with so many young players around.

There are six sophomores and five freshmen on the team. Making sure everyone stays loose is important. Before and after games. Redding has seen his approach rub off on the team. That sure was the case after picking up his first victory of the year on March 7.

On the ride back home from beating Saddleback, 11-1, in Santa Ana, where Redding struck out eight and allowed one hit in five innings, there was a car seat at the front of the bus.

The only person capable of fitting in it was freshman Kannon Stone, a 5-foot, 90-pounder. Sorensen said Stone, who looks like a third-grader, at first rejected the idea.

“Somebody told Kannon, jokingly, ‘Get in the car seat, you know that’s where [you] belong, because it is like illegal for [someone] under 60 pounds to ride in a [vehicle] without a car seat,’ ” Sorensen said. “I kind of encouraged him, ‘Kannon, get in man! It will be funny.’ He’s like, ‘No coach! No!’

“After I asked him about three times, he’s like ‘All right! If I don’t have to do conditioning, I’ll do it.’ I’m like, ‘Kannon, if you get in the car seat, nobody does conditioning.’ So we didn’t do conditioning on Monday because Kannon got in the car seat and [we] took a picture of it.”

There is a picture of it on the team’s website, estanciabaseball.com. There is Kannon smiling while buckled up.

“[He] showed us the proper way to sit in a car seat,” said Redding, who’s also shown what it takes for a struggling program to bounce back. He has contributed in many ways to creating a positive atmosphere.

Those early 9 a.m. weekend duties to the field in the off-season are paying off. Redding even helped to pour wet cement in the dugout. He helped redo the pitching mound, making it higher to give him, and the rest of the staff, Tomasek, junior Troy McClanahan, sophomores Marc DeFrenza and Ryan Boselo and freshman Victor Trujillo, a better chance to stop hitters.

“We’ve redone the entire field,” said Redding, adding that it wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the coaching staff, the school, the booster club, the parents, and the players. “We put new benches in [the dugouts], the shelves, we repainted the dugouts, we repainted the backstop, everything. It looks like it’s supposed to. [It feels] like an actual program.”

There’s one thing missing.

The advertising sign on the outfield fence Redding said he sold to a company that has allowed, along with other money raised by the program, Sorensen to purchase three new sets of Nike jerseys, cardinal, black and white, for the team, to go with cardinal-colored New Era hats.

Gone are those $7 gray hats Redding said were from Bangladesh and arrived late last season.

“I don’t see mine up yet,” Redding said of his banner. “Fundraising is fun. We had to go around [telling] companies, ‘We’re here from Estancia. Would you like to sponsor our baseball program?’ ”

Redding made sure to close the deal with a business-like handshake and not his convoluted one.

DAVID CARRILLO PEÑALOZA may be reached at (714) 966-4612 or at david.carrillo@latimes.com.