UCLA Going for Another NCAA Roundball Title

And you thought UCLA got its kicks only from John Lee?

Guess again. With all due respect to the Bruin placekicker and his All-American toe, that idea has been given the boot by the UCLA soccer team, which has an All-American of its own, Paul Caligiuri, and a shot at a national championship, something even a win in the Rose Bowl won’t give Lee and the rest of his football teammates.

Tonight at the Kingdome, UCLA will be bidding for its first national soccer title when it plays American University of Washington, D.C., in the NCAA Division I final.

First, however, there were classroom finals that required attention. When the team flew here Thursday, senior Paul Krumpe, an engineering major, brought one of his tests along. The class is aircraft design, stability and control, which should leave him just loads of time to get his head into the game.

“I have to take a test here, too,” said senior goalkeeper and free spirit Dave Vanole. “But it sounds a lot less romantic than Paul’s. It’s in folklore.”

Asked to describe the class, Vanole said: “Well, it’s about . . . it’s about everything.”

Most people on campus probably know about as much about soccer as they do about folklore, but at least lately, someone has taken note of the Bruin soccer team.

“I’ll be walking on campus and somebody will say, ‘Good luck,’ ” said senior midfielder Doug Swanson. “I say to myself, ‘Wait, do I know that person?’ ”

Somebody must be paying attention. Five years ago, when Vanole and Krumpe arrived at UCLA, they had to pay for their own cleats. Now, they’re given shoes and sweat suits and practice clothes and travel bags.

UCLA Coach Sigi Schmid remembers a team banquet in 1979 when only 12 people showed up. Last year, it was 135. And though Schmid still has to battle the intramural program for use of the school’s soccer field, he has his own way of measuring progress: “First, they put a snow fence around the field, then a chain-link fence, and then we got streamers.”

And even though Schmid only has five soccer scholarships to offer, which he splits among 15 players, he’s gotten a commitment from the athletic department to increase the allotment in the future. A national championship, of course, wouldn’t hurt, especially at a school that hasn’t won a national title in any men’s sport in two years, a drought by UCLA standards.

The Bruins could also play the patriotic angle tonight. In this game, they’ll be more American than American, whose roster is dominated by foreign-born players. Seven of the Eagles’ 11 starters weren’t born in the USA.

UCLA, on the other hand, has only Californians on its team.

“We wanted to develop an American team,” Schmid said. “All things being equal, we wanted to take kids from California, and all things being equal again, kids from Southern California.”

Schmid is far from your basic, red-white-and-blue jingoist, however. He was born in Tuebingen, West Germany, and his father’s name is Fritz. “You can’t get more German than that, can you?” he said with a grin.

And when Schmid was playing for UCLA in the early ‘70s, the last time the Bruins advanced as far as the NCAA final, he was surrounded by players who dialed long distance when they called home--at overseas rates, too, to places like Ethiopia and Colombia.

“I can relate to American,” he said. “That’s where we were 10 years ago.”

And it isn’t as if Schmid didn’t get an assist from the rest of the world in assembling a team that has lost only one game all season and last week defeated Evansville, the nation’s No. 1-ranked team, in the semifinals.

Midfielder Mike Getchell, for example, was recruited from Berkeley High, but at heart, he’s a Brazilian. He spent 15 years in Brazil with his parents, Episcopal missionaries.

And Dale Ervine, UCLA’s leading scorer, came to the Bruins courtesy of Ireland, where his father, Bob, had played professionally for an Irish first division team. Bob Ervine came to L.A. to play for Scandia, a semipro team in the Greater L.A. League. When he left his wife and children in Ireland, he told them it would be for just a few months. Next thing they knew, they were on a plane to their new home, Los Angeles.

The Bruins, though, aren’t out to settle any international scores. This team has a creed that transcends any borders: “One, two, three. Have fun, boys.”

Oh, sure, winning counts, too. Ever since they lost to Clemson, 4-1, in the semifinals last season, the Bruins have been pointing to tonight’s game.

“We kind of cruised this season,” said senior midfielder Swanson. “We don’t want to admit it, but we did.”

There’s no cruising now. But at one point this season, the UCLA players called a meeting among themselves and decided that maybe Schmid and assistant coach Steve Sampson were riding them too hard.

“We were having problems getting along with the staff and among ourselves,” said senior defender Krumpe. “We weren’t having fun.”

That message was given to Sampson, who relayed it to Schmid. He lightened up, and so did the team, which adopted the “Have fun, boys” cheer to remind themselves why they were out there in the first place.

“And we haven’t lost since we started the cheer,” Krumpe said.

Schmid concedes that he might have been a little too tough. “But I’ve never been a person who felt afraid to admit I was wrong,” he said. “I would have been a bigger fool to perpetuate a mistake.”

No one clashed with Schmid more frequently than Getchell, whom Sampson calls “the most skillful player in the country.”

Getchell acquired those skills in Recifi, a city in northeastern Brazil that he still considers home.

“In Brazil, there was only one interest and that was soccer,” he said. “I don’t remember how old I was, but I remember playing my first game barefoot on a dirt lot, with a ball that was flat.

“For all of us, the goal was to become national team players.”

His parents, who had gone to Brazil as short-term missionaries, liked it there so much that they stayed until Getchell was of high school age. He wasn’t prepared for what he encountered on his return to the States. “Culture shock,” he said.

But at least there was still soccer, and when Getchell arrived at UCLA, playing soccer was about all that mattered. He hadn’t even met Schmid before coming to school. When he did, it was another jolt.

Not only was Schmid tough, authoritarian and demanding, but his teams played a different style game. Getchell played a game that emphasized finesse and technique.

“When I first came here, we played an English style, a lot of long balls, kick and run,” he said. “You had to be fast and tough. I had the worst seasons of my life.”

After two years, Getchell couldn’t take any more. He gave up his scholarship, left school and returned to Brazil for a year, where he taught English and played soccer.

“I want to end up there,” he said. “It’s my home. The warmth of the people-- color humano-- makes it special. They say L.A. is laid-back, but it’s still life in the fast lane--a lot of money, drugs, and awfully competitive. In Brazil, there’s no hurry to get from Point A to Point B. It’s polite to be late. People aren’t uptight.”

But after considerable reflection, Getchell decided that although Brazil may be home, UCLA was where he wanted to get his degree and play soccer. Upon his return, he reconciled his differences with Schmid. Schmid, in turn, gave Getchell more room for creativity.

“He’s an ambitious coach, very strict and regimented, and he stresses discipline,” Getchell said of Schmid. “And we wouldn’t be here without him.”

A serious knee injury that required reconstructive surgery put Getchell out for most of last season, and although he said he has regained only 90% of his speed, the step he has lost may have been balanced out by the maturity he gained.

“When you’re hurt, all you can do is think,” he said.

The added maturity has helped to calm him down as well. “I used to average three or four ejections a year and one yellow card a game,” Getchell said. “That Latin temper, I guess.”

Coaches Schmid and Sampson have a different explanation for calming Getchell. Other players have a meal several hours before a game, but for some reason, Getchell has to eat just before playing. “A peanut butter sandwich before the game seems to make a difference,” Schmid said.

Getchell wasn’t the only one set back by injury. Ervine, who started playing soccer when he was 4 and his dad was coaching a youth team in Torrance, was put out of action earlier this season in a game against Nevada Las Vegas.

Ervine caught the studs of a UNLV player’s shoes across the top of his foot, bruising the tendons. Sampson said that Ervine was fouled on the play, which only made it that much sweeter for Ervine when he scored in double overtime to beat UNLV, 1-0, in the Western Regional final.

Krumpe called it the most memorable goal of the year.

Recalling the play, Schmid said: “Their fullback mis-hit a goal kick and it came right to Mike Getchell, who kicked it to Ervine, who was coming diagonally from the right side. He had about a half-step on the defender, and from about 25 yards he kicked it into the upper corner of the goal. A beautiful goal.”

Ervine, who showed up at an interview wearing a Yankee cap, isn’t much of a practice player. But even though he was shifted from midfielder to forward after his injury, the Bruin captain has scored a goal in each of UCLA’s playoff victories.

The Bruins went into last Sunday’s game against Evansville as decided underdogs. GoalkeeperVanole, a one-time power-hitting left fielder who became a goalie in high school when the regular keeper was hurt, wouldn’t like it any other way.

“They were holding up signs there saying, ‘UCLA--Another Reason to Hate California,’ ” Vanole said. “Guys were coming up to us in shorts, saying they were trying to make us feel at home.

“I like playing in front of hostile crowds and shutting them down.”

It helps, of course, to have defenders like Krumpe--who has started all but one of the last 89 games in which he has played, even with a badly sprained ankle last week--and Caligiuri, a former U.S. national team captain who was called “as fine a back as you’ll see” by Indiana Coach Jerry Yeagley.

UCLA never has played American in soccer. Both schools played in the same tournament earlier this season in Florida. “But Sigi (Schmid) has a funny rule--he doesn’t like us watching another team we may play,” Vanole said.

So, the UCLA players have little choice but to leave the strategy to Schmid and assistant Sampson, whom Getchell called “tactically, one of the smartest coaches I’ve ever had.”

By now, the Bruin players have their own game plan committed to memory: “One, two, three. . . . “