Family life at the home of Amy and Larry Urzua appears perfectly bucolic, with four sporty daughters romping in a yard bordered by a white picket fence.
But it actually often escalates into a madcap dash from one athletic event to another for the former Bishop Diego High School sweethearts.
And as for the picket fence?
“About half of its planks are missing now from having been broken by soccer balls or volleyballs,” Larry said. “If you come by the house, you’ll see that the girls are always out in the yard together, playing soccer, or two-on-two volleyball. And everybody gets involved.
“My wife keeps telling me to tear down the fence, which I will do eventually.”
It was too soon to start the demolition last week, with the four sisters in their final run together on Bishop Diego’s championship girls volleyball team. The Urzuas — senior Alina, junior Siena and freshman Eliana — were half of the Cardinals’ starting unit.
And Karina, the sixth-grader in the family, wasn’t about to be left out of the action.
“She actually sits on the bench with (assistant coach) Ed Gover and gives service areas to her sisters,” Larry said. “It’s pretty cool for Karina to be involved like that, too. She’s been having a blast.”
A 13-match winning streak took Bishop to its first CIF-Southern Section girls volleyball championship since the late 1970s when it won four titles in five years.
The Cardinals also won two CIF State Tournament matches this season, upsetting No. 2 seed Taft before third-seeded Exeter ended their run in Saturday’s Division IV Regional Semifinals.
“We were actually talking about this on the drive home the other day, just the three of us, about how every single game could be our last one together,” Alina said. “We were just talking about how this high school year would be the last time we’d be going to go to school together, so ‘Just treasure everything.’
“It’s been really special.”
Larry and his wife, who was known as Amy Carty when she pounded volleyballs for Bishop Diego nearly three decades ago, get a kick out of seeing their three daughters touch the ball on the same play.
“At one point in a recent match, Dillan (Bennett, the head coach), was going, ‘OK, Siena is digging, Alina is setting and Eliana is hitting,’” Larry said. “And Amy and I were just laughing in the stands.”
Alina, who recently received an offer to play beach volleyball at 15th-ranked Stetson University, served for three seasons as Bishop’s setter. The emergence of Amy Mancinelli, however, allowed Bennett to move Alina to an outside hitting position for her senior season.
Younger sister Eliana, a highly rated indoor volleyball player, joined her on the front line this season as one of the Frontier League’s top hitters.
“They all actually started in soccer, then went to club soccer before concentrating on their own sports,” Larry said. “They’ve all been doing their club thing this year, balancing their main sports with high school volleyball.”
Soccer has remained Siena’s main sport, a situation that created one of those mad-dash situations on Saturday. She played on the back line for the Camarillo Eagles during a morning match at the ECNL National Showcase Tournament in San Diego and then jumped in the car for the five-plus-hour drive to Exeter, located in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Visalia.
“We have to go back to San Diego for another soccer match on Sunday,” Larry said. “But it’s a typical weekend for us. Amy and I are constantly in different cities with one of the girls.”
They drove two cars to last week’s match at Taft Charter High in Woodland Hills.
“Siena and I kept on going to San Diego after the match,” Larry said, “while Amy drove everybody else back to Santa Barbara.”
But Sunday dinners are reserved for family time.
“That’s the one time that we all make sure that nobody has any plans, nobody is going over to a friend’s house,” Larry said.
The conversation at the dinner table often turns to sports. Bishop football is included in those discussion, with Larry having coached the Cardinals’ defensive line since 2003.
“I think I went to my first Bishop football game when I was 3 months old,” Alina said.
Her dad starred as a defensive end for the Cardinals’ CIF-SS Division IV finalist team of 1992 and continued on to play at Cal State Northridge.
Siena is bound for her own collegiate career in soccer.
“She already has a D1 offer on the table (from Cal Poly),” Larry said. “She’s not necessarily the volleyball player but she’s been doing really well with her sisters. It’s been fun.”
They had long planned for this Season of the Sisters.
“We’ve been thinking about this since elementary school, when we knew that we were all going to Bishop,” Alina said. “Our parents went there, so we knew we were all going to go and play together. We’ve been looking forward to it for a while.”
Her dad remembers the subject arising two years ago when he was coaching Eliana in a Page Youth Center basketball league.
“I was coaching with a good friend of mine, and he asked her, ‘Why are you playing volleyball?’” Larry recalled. “She told him, ‘Because it’s the only sport that I’m going to be able to play with my sisters.’”
Sibling rivalries have taken a back seat most of the time.
“Obviously, sisters will bicker or whatever, but we’ve always gotten along super-well,” Alina said. “To all be on the same team felt kind of natural, and it was just so much fun.”
It was a good way to knock down barriers between the three, not to mention a battered, white picket fence.
— Noozhawk sports columnist Mark Patton is a longtime local sports writer. Contact him at sports@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk Sports on Twitter: @NoozhawkSports. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook. The opinions expressed are his own.