By Pete Borello

Some teens spend the summer sleeping in and hanging out.

Not Ryan Stanley.

The water polo player is in the pool well before most of his fellow students at Los Altos High have climbed out of their beds.

Not that it’s easy for Stanley to make these 6:30 a.m. practices his West Bay Water Polo Club holds four days a week at Los Altos.

“The snooze button is my favorite button,” said Stanley, who’s entering his sophomore year. “But I just think to myself that I have to get better and have to get up.”

He has gotten better. Much better.

Stanley has been playing water polo for only two years, yet he recently made the USA Water Polo National Cadet Boys Team.

About 150 players from across the nation tried out for the National Cadet Team, which is for players 15 and under. Only 30 of them made the roster.

“I really didn’t think I’d make it,” said Stanley, who survived three days of tryouts in Claremont over Memorial Day weekend. “I’m not that fast of a swimmer. But I have good knowledge of the game and I think my leadership skills helped.”

Stanley’s water polo smarts may be his best weapon, according to one of his West Bay coaches.

“His knowledge of the game is so good that it has always outpaced his physical abilities, especially size and speed,” said Jon Wiener, a Los Altos graduate. “What that means is that he usually winds up being the smallest and slowest guy on whatever team he makes. People who watch him, even his coaches, have a hard time explaining why he’s so good.”

The lanky Stanley - who plays the driver position - admits swimming is his biggest weakness and probably kept him off the 15-player National Cadet traveling squad that will play in Yugoslavia later this summer.

However, Stanley’s swimming is getting better. He attributes that to West Bay’s summer swim practices - which Stanley takes part in four days a week - and a season on the Los Altos swim team. The Los Altos resident said he improved his 500-yard freestyle time by 30 seconds during the spring swim season.

No one may be more impressed with Stanley’s rapid improvement than Wiener, who encouraged the former baseball player to come out for water polo.

“He was the worst swimmer on the team that (first) year, and we spent the first two weeks just working on his eggbeater kick,” Wiener said. “He finally got that down toward the end of the summer, and that fall he started coming into his own as a player. By the time I came back the next summer to coach, he was a top shooter, ball-handler and defender.”

Stanley said he is driven by the desire to be the best player he can be.

“I like to see my limits,” he said, “and I haven’t reached them yet.”

Getting there means continuing his summer regimen of pre-dawn weight training, mid-morning water polo practices and afternoon swim sessions.

And loving every minute of it.

“It’s not a chore for him,” his mom Charlene Stanley said. “He loves it.”

Ryan’s father Scott Stanley added, “He’d probably play more if he could.”