A Reputation to Maintain : USC Women’s Basketball Team Is Having Trouble This Season Living Up to Past Success

The problem with playing for the USC women’s basketball team is that tradition has a way of backfiring. The Trojans, ranked 18th in the country, are 16-6 overall and 10-2 in the Pacific 10 Conference heading into today’s game against Arizona at the Sports Arena. Five of their losses were to top-20 teams. They are leading the conference in scoring and are No. 1 in the standings, a half-game ahead of Washington.

Still, the question remains: What’s wrong with USC?

When the Trojans have lost, they’ve done it by scores of 89-69 (Texas), 89-75 (Tennessee), 83-63 (Ohio State), 102-85 (California, the third straight loss), 87-69 (Cal State Long Beach) and 73-61 (Washington). None closer than 12 points, four with margins of 17 or more.

“I think it has been a struggle because they are USC and they have a lot of pride,” said Washington Coach Chris Gobrecht, whose Huskies temporarily took over first place in the Pac-10 with the Jan. 31 win in Seattle. “It’s always hard when you’ve been at the top and everybody acts like they won the World Series when they beat you. It’s a compliment to the program when someone does get so excited when they beat you, but it is hard on your pride.”

If so, USC is getting plenty of compliments these days.

What could be the problem? Theories abound.

--The Trojans are victims of their own success. Final Four appearances three of the past four years have set high standards. Nothing is wrong with the 1986-87 team, it’s just not up to par. And besides, weren’t people just waiting to see this happen after Cheryl Miller left?

“When we’re on the road, there are comments from the stands,” USC Coach Linda Sharp said. “ ‘SC, you don’t have Cheryl Miller anymore.’ Sure our players hear that. One thing, this team really wants to do well. They don’t want to hear about the past. They want to do well now.”

--Lack of chemistry. Miller is gone and so is Cynthia Cooper, and with them went much of the heart from last season’s team that reached the NCAA championship game. Some say it is a noticeable difference.

--A transition time for Sharp. In the past six seasons, she had grown to enjoy her role as head of USC’s glamour teams, the ones in which Pam and Paula McGee were doing the magazine interviews and Miller was accepting another award one day and dribbling around the stage at the Emmy’s the next.

And now. . . .

“This group is very low-key and very intense,” Sharp said. “But their competitiveness is different than the others. Sometimes, we’ve had to tell them to give each other high fives.”

--Injuries and sickness. Right from the start, the Trojans were playing catch-up.

Monica Lamb, a transfer student from the University of Houston who was expected to pick up much of the scoring slack from Miller, went through a tough time two weeks before the season when her father died. Rhonda Windham, the point guard and the only senior on the team, injured her ankle in the opener against Old Dominion. Kalen Wright, a backup guard, also got hurt in December.

They went to Miami for a major tournament, were wiped out by the flu bug and suffered back-to-back losses to Tennessee and Ohio State.

Four days later, in the Pac-10 opener, the Trojans were trounced by Cal. How low could they go?

“I don’t think SC is in shambles,” Gobrecht said. “They lost two road games (Cal and Washington) to two good basketball teams.

“A good indication of how much people still respect USC is to look at the top 20. I think that speaks very strongly for the reputation of the team. USC has lost to two teams ranked below them and is still hanging in, and I don’t know how many teams could have survived that. USC is one of the top 20 teams in the nation and no one is going to get me to change my mind on that.”

Sharp: “At USC, the expectations are very high. It’s like a monster has been created, and we have to live up to it.”

There have been high points--Cherie Nelson’s continued emergence as a scorer and Paula Pyers’ as a leader, Lamb’s play inside, Windham’s play at the point--but it has been a frustrating year even for Sharp.

“We have not played consistent basketball,” she said. “I was really disappointed with our showing at the Miami tournament. We came back really strong against Tennessee and then lost the lead, and I realized then that we didn’t have the depth to sustain any lead against a team like that.”

Now, the Trojans have to be concerned with sustaining its lead in the Pac-10. They try again today.

Notes Tipoff for today’s game is 2:30, the second half of the doubleheader that features the USC-UCLA men’s game. . . . Cal State Long Beach was No. 1 in the nation in offense through Feb. 9 with a 92.5 per-game average, a sizeable lead over Auburn (87.4). USC was 15th at 81.5 through its first 21 games. The 49ers were also fifth in free-throw shooting (74%) and 11th in field-goal percentage (50.2%), while forward Cindy Brown was No. 5 in individual scoring at 26.1. She had 33 points Thursday against UC Santa Barbara. Tonight, the 49ers (21-2 overall and 11-1 in the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn.) play at the University of the Pacific (10-10, 3-8). . . . UCLA (15-7, 8-4 in the Pac-10) meets Arizona State (9-12, 3-9) at 4 p.m. at the Wooden Center. The Bruins lead the all-time series with the Sun Devils, 13-4, including a 85-78 win in Tempe earlier this season, a game in which forward Dora Dome scored 35 points. . . . Dome continues to lead UCLA in scoring with 17.5 points a game, while guard Jaime Brown is second at 12.8. Dome and Sheri Bouldin share the lead in rebounding at 6.1. Freshman Sandra VanEmbricqs had a school-record 13 steals Thursday night in the 65-59 win over Arizona, breaking the old mark of 12 set by Ann Meyers in 1977. . . . USC’s rematch with Washington, which could figure prominently for the Pac-10 championship, has been moved from Cal State Dominguez Hills to the campus gym. “I’m so happy about that,” Trojan Coach Linda Sharp said. “That’s where we practice a lot, so it’s like home.” . . . California has beaten USC and Washington, the two best teams in the Pac-10, at home, but not UCLA. The Bruins’ 77-72 win Jan. 4 in Berkeley is even more impressive because of it.