OUT OF THE SHADOWS

SANTA PAULA —  The gym at Santa Paula High had been put to sleep for the night when at 10:15 p.m., the doors rattled open and balls began to bounce on the hardwood floor.

With the bounces came laughter and layups and the swishing of balls through a net that would soon be cut down. The girls’ basketball team had clinched the Frontier League title earlier that night, completing an 8-0 league run with a victory at rival Santa Clara.

It was the first undefeated, outright title for the small school that opened in 1889 and that has played girls’ basketball for more than a century.

Amid toasts and tears, the girls marked the moment with snapshots and sparkling cider. Coach Emily Stenzel climbed a ladder and cut the first strand off the net at 10:28 p.m. In a small town built on small moments, where change comes stubbornly, Stenzel and her team celebrated the achievement.

“After the game, the girls were saying that they would be bringing their grandchildren to see their names on the banner years from now,” Stenzel said. “That’s what this means. For us, this has always been a boys’ basketball school. This puts our girls on the map for this town.”

One by one, Santa Paula’s players climbed the ladder. Each snipped a strand of cord. One by one, they carved a small piece of history.

The Cardinals could add another chapter when they host San Marino in a Southern Section Division III-AA second-round playoff game tonight at 7:30.

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Stenzel’s players are the torchbearers for a sport once played at the school by girls who wore prairie dresses and traveled to Fillmore, Ventura and Oxnard by horse and wagon. The modest beginning of Santa Paula girls’ basketball is captured in the school’s 1900 yearbook.

“The girls look quite valiant in their new basketball suits,” the yearbook enthusiastically reported.

Even though basketball was the only sport offered to girls, Santa Paula girls’ teams always received second billing once a boys’ team was formed in 1905.

But through basketball, the girls kept attempting to gain equality.

“One of the first desires a boy has on entering the Santa Paula High School is to become an athlete,” were the first words penned in the sports section of a 20th century school yearbook.

The Santa Paula girls, though, won their first recorded basketball championship in 1907, defeating Ventura for the “Ventura County Championship,” which consisted of Santa Paula, Ventura, Santa Barbara and Oxnard.

Today it would be considered a league title, but it wasn’t outright, because the Cardinals lost to Ventura in the first round of league play. The undefeated honor would have to wait until the next century.

As football replaced baseball as Santa Paula’s passion, interest in girls’ basketball waned after World War I. By 1927, play against other schools has ended with the formation of the Girls’ Athletic Assn., which restricted basketball to physical education classes. Santa Paula took a step backward and played the game as an intramural sport.

When the gym, which still stands, was dedicated in 1930, Santa Paula girls were 52 years from playing a California Interscholastic Federation game.

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“It makes me mad,” guard Rachael Kolbeck said. “The guys get all the glory. They get all the attention. We work just as hard.”

Santa Paula finished the regular season with an 18-5 record that included two victories over Santa Clara. The Saints prevented Santa Paula from clinching its first outright title last season with a last-second victory in the second league meeting between the teams.

After this season’s title-clinching victory, Santa Paula players tore up the newspaper articles from last season’s loss and vowed to burn them.

“This town has a lot of tradition and it’s very small,” said Stenzel, who played at Thacher, a tiny school established in Ojai more than a century ago. “Things move slowly [in Santa Paula]. This championship means we were the first, and hopefully not the last.”

The school has built its sports program around football and boys’ basketball. The annual football game with rival Fillmore has a storied tradition. But girls’ sports are rebounding from the days when the girls’ sports sections of the Santa Paula yearbooks in the 1950s devoted most of their space to cheerleaders wearing poodle skirts.

Santa Paula was even slow to implement Title IX gender-equity mandates after it became law in 1972.

Schools such as Buena, a girls’ basketball national power, played GAA basketball since the late 1960s and started its CIF involvement with an 8-0 record in 1973-74. Meanwhile, Santa Paula double-dribbled around the changing times. The school did not field a CIF team until 1982-83, when it finished 1-17, and followed with a 1-15 record in 1983-84.

Santa Paula’s first winning record was 15-6 in 1989-90. The Cardinals shared three Frontier titles entering this season.

“I think we don’t get the respect we deserve,” senior Carla Berumen said. “We were the first [school girls’] team to go 8-0.”

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Stenzel took over in 1997-98. She had to recruit players for a team that would finish 9-15 her first season. There was gradual improvement. The Cardinals were 13-13 the next season and 18-8 last season.

With victory came resurgence. The program’s numbers swelled. For the first time in recent history, Santa Paula had frosh-soph, junior varsity and varsity teams for girls’ basketball.

This season, the varsity was helped by the emergence of sophomore guard Sarah Ruiz. She scored a school-record 42 points in a game and had 32 in the title-clincher against Santa Clara. Kolbeck, the fourth of nine siblings, averages 16 points.

The first playoff game for the first undefeated league champion in more than 100 years of play at Santa Paula will be Stenzel’s 100th game at the school. She has fostered a new attitude.

“I was going to be a cheerleader at first,” said Claudia Berumen, Carla’s twin. “I walked in and said, ‘This is not for me.’

“When [Stenzel] started here, we barely had a team. Now look at us. But sometimes you still hear it, ‘Oh, what about the boys?’ ”

The boys were not in site when Stenzel opened the gym late on a school night to let her players etch the moment into their memories. After cutting the last strand of net, the players placed it around their coach’s neck.

More than a century had passed and the Cardinal girls finally had a championship all their own.

“It’s important for them to remember that this is their moment that has been a long time in coming,” Stenzel said. “You have to persevere.”

Stenzel then closed the gym doors on one century and opened another.

“We can bring our kids out here and say to them, ‘Hey, look up there at the banner,’ ” Carla Berumen said. “We can watch our kids and watch them get a banner like we did.”