Feb. 7 — Imagine the heat of battle. Your coach calls time out and as you and your teammates gather round, he starts telling you what to do – in Spanish. You turn to your assistant coach, who takes out a pocket translator and eventually everyone figures out what needs to be done.

Or you arrive at tournament and find out that your opponents have names like Universidad Regional del Norte and Universidad Autonoma de Chihuahua.

Or during drills, the coach begins yelling at you to “fasten your feet!”

Welcome to life with the El Paso Wildfire 18s.

“Sometimes we all get really stumped on how to say something in Spanish, or the coaches get stuck trying to help us understand,” says Alyn Marlow. “Then, Rosa gets out her little handheld translator thing and we figure out what word we’re trying to say. We always figure it out, eventually!”

Marlow, a 5’9” senior from El Paso Coronado, is an OH/MB for Wildfire. Rosa is Rosa Enriquez — assistant coach, mother of star setter Jazmine Enriquez and occasional team translator.

The coach is Jose Luis Chacon, a high school coach in Juarez, Mexico. During his 17-year career, he has coached five national championship men's teams in the Open division in Mexico and two women’s national Open champions. He has coached an 18s girls team to a second place finish at nationals. He also speaks very little English, but three times a week he makes the trek across the border from Mexico to El Paso to coach Wildfire, which has to be one of the state’s most unique club teams. The drive across the bridge can take anywhere from one to two hours each way.

Whether you speak Spanish, English or Spanglish, however, one thing is clear. Chacon believes in defense and fundamentals, partly because that’s how the sport is played in Mexico and partly because no Wildfire player is over 5’11”.

"The first and most important thing for me to coach is fundamentals,” he says through a translator. “I expect every player at every position to learn defense, and once they learn that, I expect one hundred percent all the time."

“I think it's cool that we get to learn a completely different style of volleyball,” says Savannah Leeper, a 5’9” junior middle who also attends Coronado. “In Mexico, the focus is all on defense, and that's the way our coaches tell us to be, too. That's perfect for us since we aren't very tall at all.”

Although the team showed a few sparks of greatness at last year’s Lone Star Qualifier, Wildfire burst onto the scene a couple of weeks ago with a third place finish at the Fiesta Classic in Phoenix. Not only was it the best finish among all Texas teams, but the team’s performance included a straight set win over Amarillo Juniors as well as a victory over the highly regarded Tulsa VBC and others. The only loss was a 3-set battle with Arizona Juniors. A fluke? Not likely. The team includes many of the best players from El Paso’s top high school programs like Coronado and Franklin. There are stars such as Jordan Bostic, a 5’10” OH who was the El Paso Times' area MVP this past season.

There is Jazmine Enriquez, one of the state’s best setters you probably never heard of. She is also setter for Mexico’s national team and the 5’9” senior grew up in a family whose mother and father are accomplished volleyball players. Jazmine, who attends Coronado, wasn’t able to play high school this past season because the UIL ruled that she had used all her eligibility (long story short – she and her family moved to El Paso a couple of years ago and it was decided that one of her years in Mexico counted against her four years of high school eligibility). As a result of growing up in a volleyball family, Enriquez is a savvy, intense player and will take her skills to UTEP this fall.

Then there is Kim Oguh, a 5’11” junior middle, whose family moved to the U.S. from Nigeria. Oguh is a high school track star at El Paso Hanks (200, triple jump, long jump) so she rarely gets a chance to work out with the volleyball team. In fact, she’ll miss the first day of the Las Vegas tournament for a track meet. Still, her athletic ability and performance in Arizona caught the attention of coaches and observers and word is that she’ll soon be showing up on the major scouting services.

The young team (only three seniors) also includes Brandy Gore, a 5’8” junior OH from Coronado; Lyssa Ramirez, a 5’6” senior setter/defensive specialist from Franklin; Magali Rodriguez, a 5'5" DS/libero from Coronado; Sarah Renteria, a 5’1” sophomore libero from Franklin; and Pamela Acosta, a 17-year-old 5’8” OH from Mexico. All are athletic and skilled.

To the players, it is an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – a chance to be coached by one of the best and enjoy a cultural experience at the same time.

"It's nice to have coaches that are patient,” says Gore, “especially with the language difference. It’s hard for our coaches to come all the way across the border and coach us, but they are always there. It makes us feel like we are a priority."

Perhaps as much as the volleyball training, however, the players realize this is an opportunity to learn more than another style of volleyball. Practices, timeouts and games sometimes evolve into a wild mix of languages and gestures as the players and coaches try to communicate.

“It’s great at practice,” says Leeper, “at the same time that the coaches are trying to pick up on more English words, we are learning more and more Spanish. We have to work together, putting together the bits and pieces of Spanish we all know in order to understand, but somehow we always manage to. "

“Both Coach Chacon and Rosa have tried really hard to pick up the language better, and they get better everyday,” says Bostic. “They have to put twice as much work into everything as coaches who already speak English do. It's pretty funny in practice though. Our personal favorite is when coach says 'fasten your feet!' instead of 'run faster!' "

"I do a little of everything while I'm demonstrating,” says Chacon. “(I use) a few English words and a few Spanish words. Sometimes in a game I can't tell them all that I need to, to correct them and coach them. Tactics and strategy are difficult for me during the game."

The team actually began showing signs of its potential last year at the Lone Star Classic qualifier, going 6-0 in pool play including a win over eventual champion Texas Elite. The girls ran out of gas on Sunday, however, and finished tied for ninth in the 17s Club division. With Enriquez away competing for her national team, Wildfire missed its other chance to qualify for the JOs during the Sun Country regionals. This year the goal is a trip to Atlanta, and the team is off to a good start.

“We’re still a fraction of how good we’re going to be,” says Don Bostic, a former college basketball player and father of Jordan.

This weekend the team will cross the border to Juarez to compete in a tournament that includes several college teams from Mexico. Next weekend they will be in Las Vegas, where they will get a better idea of how they fit into the state and national picture. In April they will be in Austin for Lone Star hoping to qualify for the JOs. The team doesn’t have a huge travel budget so other than those tournaments, most of their matches will be events close to El Paso.

“What we are is a neighborhood team,” says Bostic. “We don’t even have nationals in our travel budget, but if we qualify, I’m sure we can find a way to make the trip.”