A curious thing happened when the young Griffiths kids went running. Kangaroos would run alongside them.
Of course, this probably wasn’t so odd, considering Lisa and her brother Justin grew up in Australia, near a national park full of ‘roos. “Let’s just say you learn to run with kangaroos pretty quickly, and you can’t be scared of them,” says Lisa Griffiths, new girls field hockey coach at La Jolla High School.
(You can hear the Aussie lilt when Griffiths speaks – members of her team have had to get used to her accent and a little different idiom. Even the simplest words get bent in a different direction.) Sometimes, other critters came along the path where Lisa was running, like an echidna, or spiny anteater. “I remember this one time I was running when I saw an echidna,” she says bemusedly. “My dad (a coach) wanted to know why I was so slow that day. I must have spent about 20 minutes just sitting there watching it and patting it” – hopefully with a gentle touch so as to avoid the pointy quills. But the Vikings girls and their parents are delighted to have the friendly Aussie coaching for them instead of against them, as she did while guiding the Clairemont High team last year prior to filling coach Paula Conway’s spot. Conway, athletic director at La Jolla, hired Griffiths so Conway could step down from coaching and manage her AD, teaching and family duties. Senior Trisha Turner, one of the team’s captains, affirms the new coach’s connection with the team. “She organized a lot of team hikes (during the summer). We had a beach run. She is very open,” says the offensive midfielder. A parent calls Griffiths “a player’s coach” – very attentive to the girls, whose Griffiths-led defense has shut out five teams in the Vikings’ first 13 games. Karla Quevedo, another captain, talks about the coach’s mentoring system. “The juniors and seniors have a couple of underclassmen that they work with,” says the senior defender. “It’s meant to help the younger players really feel like they are part of the program and that they have someone that they can come and talk to on and off the field.” Lisa’s brother Justin, who visited from Australia during the summer, shared another memory of the Griffiths’ childhood – the story behind kids’ “strength and conditioning training.” “We used to have a Hills Hoist clothesline that would spin around, and my grandma would hang the towels out to dry,” says Justin. “When she wasn’t looking, we would go out there with the dogs and spin around and around in circles with the dogs, trying to hold onto the towels as we were also spinning around. When Nana caught us, she would come out and yell at us!” “A fond memory I have as a child is: During the summer, we kids would have all the kids in the neighborhood over to play backyard cricket,” says Griffiths. “We would use rubbish bins as the wickets and this rickety old cricket bat my dad made. We could never use a real cricket ball because we always lost them, but we would put electrical tape around the middle of a tennis ball, thinking it would give us more spin.” If a batter hit the ball to the opposite trash bin, that was four runs. If she hit the fence, it was six runs. Over the fence was an out, and the hitter had to retrieve the ball. “Then there was the issue of smashing a window,” Griffiths laughs. “Then, every kid couldn’t get over the fence quick enough to get home. Needless to say, we would never tell our parents!” Griffiths’ father Frank Martinez, an immigrant to Australia from Chile, is her inspiration for coaching. He was a hard-nails coach for the kids, but he is a motivator and, like Griffiths, a coach who connects with his young players. “My dad is the reason I coach,” Griffiths says. “He works for a junior club back home for Australian rules football, and I see what those kids learn from him, and I aspire to be like him as a coach. He is really great at getting through and helping young men who are ages 16 to 18, and I hope I can do the same with these girls at the high school.” Unfortunately, Griffiths’ dad forgot most of his Spanish after he immigrated to Australia, “which is a shame, because I could sure use it now,” she says.
“He ran away from home at a young age and got mixed up with the wrong crowd. When he married my mum, he was training a lot, and running was his way of getting out any aggression he had. My dad was a pretty hard man when I was young, but he always encouraged us. “Both my brother and I competed in athletics (track). He would take us to training five days a week.”