The Irvine Valley College women's badminton won its first state title in its first appearance. The Lasers, representing Southern California, did so by defeating the Northern California representative, Skyline College, 20-1, in the California Community College Team Championship last Thursday at Skyline in San Bruno.

The state team title was the school's fifth ever. Irvine Valley has also captured two crowns in women's cross country and one each in men's soccer and men's volleyball.

The title was badminton coach Martin McGrogan's second. He also led the Lasers to the championship in soccer in 1993.

"This was quite a different coaching experience," McGrogan said. "Many of the ladies on the team have families, have completed their degrees and work full-time. Their dedication has been unbelievable. "They want to play and want to compete. They were fantastic."

The Lasers improved their record to 15-0 overall with the victory in the state final. They were 8-0 to take the Orange Empire Conference crown. Irvine Valley's toughest match on the season was a 16-5 win over El Camino.

"The neat thing about winning this is that a few of our players played for us when this was just a club sport here," McGrogan said. Women's badminton is in its third year as a community college sport. Lisa Apel, Midori Tanaka and Alice Chan came from the Irvine Valley club team.

Apel was Irvine Valley's No. 2 singles player this season, while Chan played No. 5 singles. McGrogan also got a couple of players and his assistant coach and technical director, Joseph Lin, from the Monday night badminton class that Irvine Valley offers.

"We had a very strong squad," he said. "We had 12 players where a lot of the other programs are lucky to have six."

Irvine Valley's strongest player was Lili Zhou, a freshman from China who walked on to the team. She didn't lose a match this season and was rarely challenged. "She is as good of a player as I've seen," McGrogan said. "And as an elite of an athlete as any that I have coached at this school."

Besides leading Irvine Valley to the state team title, Zhou also captured the individual state singles title and the doubles crown with teammate Ruby Hui last weekend at Skyline. Zhou beat Linh Nguyen of Fullerton in the semifinal match, 7-0, 7-0, 7-0, and defeated Elena Dumitriu of L.A. City, 7-0, 7-0, 7-2, in the singles final. Zhou and Hui beat Minako Akiyama and Phyrun Than of El Camino, 7-0, 7-5, 8-6, in the doubles final.