She’s Doing All the Right Things : Badminton: Karin Schambeck, La Habra’s premier player, proves to be a model athlete, student and daughter.

LA HABRA — Karin Schambeck isn’t perfect. The La Habra High School senior simply gets straight A’s, keeps her room as neat as a model home, eats her vegetables, goes to Bible study every morning, puts in hours of community service, is a congressional scholar, a student body officer, a human rights advocate and has excelled at piano since the age of 3.

Aside from that--and a few dozen other achievements--Schambeck is just your average kid.

Well, she’s also La Habra’s top badminton player and a three-year member of the Highlanders’ volleyball team.

“Yeah,” friend Stephanie Soiz says, “I’ve known her since Girl Scouts. I hate to say it, but she’s been a perfect person. She even gets along with her mother and stuff.”

At this, Schambeck sighs--most politely, of course. OK, so she isn’t Bart Simpson or Miss Mischief. It’s not as if she hasn’t had a few wild moments.

“I used to go toilet papering,” Schambeck says. “But I got in trouble. My friend and I were toilet papering some girl’s car, but her parents called the police. That was the end of that.”

Sandy Blumenthal, La Habra’s badminton and volleyball coach, says when it comes to attitude, Schambeck is a model athlete. She’s rarely late to practice--aside from the times when her student government meetings run late--and even as a freshman, never had to be reminded to do what she had been told.

“Was she ever squirrelly?” Blumenthal says. “Not at all. She’s just not that type of person.”

Apparently, her composure pays off. Even though she’s only 5 feet 2 and 110 pounds, Schambeck received plenty of playing time in volleyball over the past three years.

As a defensive specialist, she helped the Highlanders win three consecutive State Division II championships. Blumenthal said when Schambeck was a sophomore, she was promoted from the junior varsity in time to set a state record for most aces (seven) in a state championship match.

On the badminton court--where she’s 28-5 overall this year--Schambeck’s quick, deceptive style has made her La Habra’s No. 1 singles player for the past three years. She and Danny Sparks make up the No. 1 mixed doubles team, currently 15-4.

“She’s small and petite and moves really quickly,” Blumenthal says. “But she’s so smooth. She makes it look really easy, like it’s not hard for her at all.”

That trait is evident in other areas, too.

Schambeck started playing a small, portable piano when she was 3--without parental persuasion, her mother, Beverly, says--and by 5 was composing her own works.

“She had perfect pitch,” Beverly Schambeck says. “She could just hear a song, hum along and play it.”

Karin says she remembers taking piano lessons with kids six or seven years older than her. Her first original composition, “My Kite,” was “something a little more intricate than Chopsticks,” she says. “It went: ‘I fly my kite in the wind. . . . ‘ That’s about all I remember of the lyrics.”

Her parents and siblings say Schambeck was unusually organized and self-disciplined for a child.

Says her mother: “She was always neat and precise. She always knew where she wanted to go and how to accomplish whatever goal it was.”

Says Karin’s sister, Kameron, 14: “When Karin was younger, she’d have all her coloring books in order, and her stuffed animals were always nice and neat, on her bed--not on the floor.”

Schambeck, who will attend Brigham Young in the fall, says she certainly has her limits. Like her craving for chocolate chips dipped in peanut butter, she says, or the fact that a few of her musical preferences--rap especially--drive her parents nuts.

But procrastination, she says, is her No. 1 vice. A few weeks ago, she and an anatomy/physiology classmate had an entire week to dissect a fetal pig, but they waited until the last day.

“I thought it was pretty neat, though,” she said.