Sunny Hills Tennis Weathers Attrition, Remains Steady

FULLERTON —  No tennis coach in Orange County has been blessed with more talent the last five years than Sunny Hills’ Steve White. On the other hand, no county coach has had the misfortune of losing more talent the last two years than White.

Since 1990, White has coached nationally ranked players such as Dave Robbins, Kevin Kim, Joseph Gilbert, John Han and Chris Chung. During that time, Sunny Hills has won three Southern Section Division II team titles and reached the semifinals twice.

If Sunny Hills (15-4) defeats University today at the Irvine Racquet Club, it will have earned a sixth consecutive trip to the semifinals. White is still unsure what he will have earned, a spot in the tennis coaches’ hall of fame or a trip to the loony bin.

Consider what White has been through this season:

* On the first day of school, he lost his best player, Gilbert, who moved to Sacramento to concentrate on tennis and spend more time with his private coach.

* Early in the season, he lost his best doubles player, senior Shaun Harris, to a freak injury. While helping with a school project, Harris sliced his finger when a ladder landed on it. He missed a month.

* Han, a four-year starter and one of the county’s top singles players, has missed all but five matches because of family problems, college trips and illness.

* Joe Williamson, a senior doubles player, was declared academically ineligible last month.

* Chung, who has a 41-1 record at No. 1 singles, missed the Lancers’ first-round playoff victory over Laguna Hills because he was in South Korea visiting his ailing grandmother. Chung returned Thursday and went from the airport to the tennis court to help Sunny Hills gain a 10-8 victory over LaVerne in the second round. Had Chung’s flight been delayed, Sunny Hills probably would have lost the match. The next day, while returning home from practice, Chung’s car was sideswiped. His car suffered plenty of damage, but Chung was unhurt.

None of this season’s mishaps would have mattered much if White’s other senior, Kevin Kim, had stayed at Sunny Hills or if sophomore Ryan Moore, who lives in the Sunny Hills attendance area, had not decided to attend Servite.

Kim, who helped lead the Lancers to two section titles, left Sunny Hills after his sophomore year for Palmer Tennis Academy in Tampa, Fla. Kim is ranked sixth nationally in the boys’ 18 division and is a member of the U.S. Tennis Assn.’s national team. Moore, who said he picked Servite over Sunny Hills for academics, has reached the round of 16 in the section individual singles tournament for a second time.

White admits he occasionally thinks about how many more section titles he could have won if everybody had stayed at Sunny Hills.

“I think about how much fun it would have been for Chris [Chung] and some of these younger kids to have played with Kevin and Joseph,” White said. “I’d love to see them as seniors.”

Said Chung: “If we’d have had Joseph and Kevin, we’d have given some college teams a scare.”

Not to mention Santa Barbara, which has won eight consecutive Division I titles and dominated high school boys’ tennis the past decade.

“We would have been as good as any of those Santa Barbara teams,” White said. “It would have been fun to have a match with those guys. That would have been some dream team. I guess we had the players, we just couldn’t keep them together.”

John Choi, a sophomore doubles player, said White barely kept his team together this season. Choi said there were times when he thought the Lancers were on the verge of collapse.

“A lot of us didn’t have much confidence in a lot of our teammates,” Choi said. “There wasn’t a lot of team unity. We haven’t had a defined leader.

” . . . I was seriously thinking about quitting a couple times. I thought, ‘What is this team about? Does anybody care anymore?’ ”

But Choi and his doubles partner, Tuji Chang, continued to show up. So did Chung and freshmen Davin Lin, Raj Vyas and Jimmy Chu. Somehow, the Lancers continued winning matches. They went undefeated in the Freeway League and lost only to Corona del Mar, Woodbridge, Palos Verdes Peninsula and San Marino--all four teams still alive in the playoffs.

Said Chung: “Now that we’re all coming together, we feel like we’re as good as any team in our section. We’re going to make a run at another title.”

Provided there are enough players left to make the run.