MHS Tennis Features Four Adopted Sisters

The Fritz sisters make up 20 percent of the Monrovia High School girls varsity tennis squad. – Courtesy photo

By Christian Romo

LiAnna Fritz exits her first doubles set of the season with a 6-1 loss. She bounces throughout the match, mixing in jokes, laughs, “sorrys,” and “that’s OK” with her partner and, occasionally, her opponents.

She plays tennis with optimism, acting politely towards her competition and criticizing nobody. Her serve is more refined than most on the court and, though she struggles with long shots, her body language remains upbeat. After she speaks with her coach and two sisters, I ask her how she feels after playing her first set.

“Angry,” she replies.

Though surprising, this is an appropriate response, because all of the Fritz children are inherently surprising. You see, there are six of them, none of whom look alike, except for the two that do, and the other three who do too, and yes, that leaves one more – I promise I’ll explain that as well.

When it comes to the Fritz family, there’s a lot of explaining to do.

First come Robert and Eric, who are 27 and 26 years old, respectively, and who are Marilyn and Larry Fritz’s only biological children. They both grew up on the east coast and are currently adults living outside of the Fritz’s charming Monrovia home.

There was nothing abnormal about the Fritz’s and their two boys 15 years ago, except that according to Larry, “Marilyn always wanted to have a girl, or several girls.”

Marilyn also has an activist’s heart and wanted to make a difference. “I was a child of the ‘60s,” she says, “so I wanted to go to a place that mattered. Vietnam was very important to me.”

The Fritz’s set out to adopt a girl from Vietnam and, in 2001, they found Li Thi Bay. Li was only three years old when Marilyn and Larry met her in a town five hours north of Hanoi, and when they brought her home to Washington, D.C., they combined her birth name with a name they always wanted to name a daughter – and called her LiAnna.

Fifteen years later, LiAnna begins her senior year at Monrovia High School (MHS). Along with schoolwork and varsity tennis, she’s a member of the Associated Student Body and a Spirit Chair in Key Club.

She is bright and well spoken. She has a cat she calls Pipoca. “That means ‘popcorn’ in Portuguese,” she tells me. “He’s my baby.”

LiAnna blends in well with her teammates, mostly because she’s lived in the United States for all but a few years of her life, and partly because she’s resilient to change. “When she was six months here,” her mother Marilyn tells me, “she moved from D.C. to Arizona. A year later she moved to Maine … she lived in four houses in a year and a half.”

When asked how LiAnna handled it, her mother responded, “Astonishingly well.”

This patience helped her when Marilyn and Larry decided to adopt again eight years after adopting LiAnna.

Through an agency, they found three more girls: Bernadette, Regine, and Sharmaine. The three girls were born in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, and were orphaned when both their parents died at a young age. Bernadette was 5 years old, Regine was 3, and Sharmaine 2. A wealthy aunt stepped in after the parents’ death, but at the time could only adopt Bernadette, while Regine and Sharmaine were placed at an orphanage in the Philippines, separated from the only family they had. Five years later, when Bernadette was 10, her aunt presented her with an option. “She told me that I could stay with her or go with my sisters,” Bernadette tells me. It was an easy choice for Bernadette.

Bernadette says there were mixed emotions when all three sisters reunited at the orphanage in 2009. “They started crying. It was like they knew who I was, but they didn’t know.”

An adoption program, organized by the Philippine government, briefly sent the girls to the United States in 2010 to meet with prospective families, and after a meeting in Sacramento, the Fritz’s decided to take them in.

It took two years for the adoption to go through, but finally in 2012, Marilyn and Larry picked the three girls up from the Philippines and brought them to California.

The transition didn’t go as smoothly as planned. The girls didn’t have the benefit of growing up in the United States as LiAnna did, moving to the United States at 14, 12, and 11 years old. They also spoke little English, and they suddenly had to deal with two native-speaking siblings who had an equally poor understanding of Tagalog.

“It was hard to get along with [LiAnna],” Bernadette tells me, “we always fought.” It didn’t help that the Fritz girls all had to share one room in their Monrovia apartment when they first moved here four years ago, or as Marilyn tells it: “Two bunk beds … for six months.”

When LiAnna and Bernadette enrolled as first-years at Monrovia High School in the fall of 2012, their parents encouraged them to get involved in a school activity. Bernadette chose tennis because it reminded her of playing badminton back in the Philippines and because she heard the tennis team was a good way to meet people. LiAnna originally chose dance, but she soon switched to tennis and excelled with her sister. They’ve been playing ever since, and together with Regine, they currently make up 20 percent of the varsity team.

Like LiAnna, Bernadette is a senior at MHS. She has been working at Rudy’s Mexican Restaurant in Monrovia on Myrtle Avenue for the last year and a half, and she plans on attending Pasadena City College after she graduates.

She’s interested in medicine and is currently taking a sports medicine class at MHS. She was also in charge of DJ-ing her team’s impromptu dance parties last year and when I ask her what songs she played most often, she smiles and deflects the question.

Regine is a sophomore at MHS, and she’s the smallest of the three on the team. As a sophomore on the varsity team, she might end up better than her two older sisters, though she’s humble enough not to acknowledge it.

She’s soft spoken. She says “dude” a lot. When her coach Ken Peter calls her off the bench to take over in a singles match, she has to collect herself before realizing she can’t find her racket.

I ask her how she feels before she steps onto the court, and she tells me, “nervous, excited,” though neither show.

Though still a first-year on the junior-varsity team, the youngest sister Sharmaine might end up the best player of the four.

“She’s athletic with everything,” Marilyn tells me. “Every team wants Sharmaine first.”

Like Regine, Sharmaine is soft-spoken, though she has large aspirations. “I want to be a captain next year,” she tells me, “I want to be able to lead people and show them what they need.”

Along with JV tennis, Sharmaine participates in MHS’s Math and Science Academy and plays intramural sports at the high school. Coach Peter speaks highly of her abilities and tells me there’s a good chance that she’ll be on the varsity team with Regine next year.

If Sharmaine plays tennis all four years, MHS tennis will not have been without a Fritz for seven straight seasons. This isn’t lost on their father Larry, who smiles and tells me: “We’re just hoping to get a winning season this year. Our family name is on the line.”

MHS tennis wasn’t good last year, going winless in league play. Coach Peter thinks he has a better team this year, and if their first match at Marshall High School is any indication, he may be right.

LiAnna starts with a partner representing the Wildcat’s third doubles team and after losing the first set 6-1, Peter switches her partner with one LiAnna is more familiar with: senior Sasha Spencer.

The substitution works: LiAnna and Sasha win their final two sets, clinching the overall victory for Monrovia with the team’s 10th set win. “I feel better,” she tells me while eating a banana after her final win. Her anger, if it was ever really there in the first place, has dissipated.

After struggling through a long first set win, first-year singles player Jessica Lee tells Peter that she’s too tired to continue. Peter informs Regine that she is replacing Jessica for the second set and, for the first time all afternoon, Regine leaves Bernadette’s side.

It’s easy to see why Regine is first off the bench for the Wildcats: she’s quick and even though she’s less imposing than most of the other players, she has a confident stroke honed by weeks of summertime practice.

Her sister and coach cheer her on, but she falls 6-1 to a tough opponent. Her smile stays plastered on her face as she exits the court, though, greeting Bernadette and a few other teammates.

Monrovia has already clinched the victory by the third round of singles matches, so Peter subs in the rest of his bench, including Bernadette. She isn’t too happy about this; though she wants to play, she prefers playing doubles.

“There’s less pressure,” she tells me. She falls in the match’s final set 6-2.

Back in Monrovia, Sharmaine stars as the JV team’s number one singles player, winning two out of three sets against Marshall.

All four girls play on the same day, albeit in different cities, winning half of their eight total matches. It was a solid day overall for Monrovia tennis and the Fritz family.

As the team packs up, I give my farewells and best wishes. The three girls are mostly uninterested, focusing instead on talking to their friends and getting back home. Though certainly different from the rest of their teammates, at this point it is nearly impossible to pick them out of a crowd. They were just three high school girls who had finished their first match of the season.

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