Westwood’s New Resident Wizard : UCLA Coach Scates Tries to Win His 12th NCAA Volleyball Title

Knowing that UCLA has had the same men’s volleyball coach for 25 years and that his coaching stint began just 24 months after President Dwight Eisenhower’s Administration ended, you might expect him to be an old, grizzled-looking man, a man whose face is a subtle blend of Broderick Crawford and a Wyoming strip mine.

Al Scates has quite a surprise for you. He is neither old nor grizzled. He is only 47, but he has spent his entire adult life as a coach and teacher. Volleyball is his passion.

Tonight he sends his UCLA team into the NCAA semifinals against Ohio State at Pauley Pavilion. An NCAA championship on Saturday would be his 12th since 1970.

In 1971 Scates started to think that just maybe he was spending too much time with volleyball. He was the coach of the U.S. team then and when he left for a six-week tour of Cuba he lived in Northridge. When he returned, he lived in Tarzana. During his absence, his wife had sold their home and moved to a new neighborhood.

“I couldn’t get a phone call out of Cuba, and I didn’t know whether to go home to Northridge or home to Tarzana,” Scates said.

The couple had looked at a new home in Tarzana, and when he departed for Cuba he left the final decision up to his wife and left his attorney in charge of making the deal. The deal cleared escrow, leaving Scates to find his way from the Los Angeles International Airport to a new home he had seen only twice.

Looking back on the move, however, Scates figures it was pretty good timing on his part.

“My wife moved everything we owned to the new house. Furniture, everything,” he said. “I missed all that fun.”

In a quarter of a century at UCLA, Scates has rarely missed the fun. He has nurtured the program from infancy to adulthood. In its infancy the UCLA volleyball team looked remarkably like the UCLA basketball team. It had Keith Erickson, and it had the basketball team’s old, tattered and discarded uniforms, compliments of John Wooden.

“In my first season in 1963, I was a graduate student and the player-coach,” Scates said. “It wasn’t an NCAA sport, so anyone enrolled at the university could play. I had three law school students on the team. If nothing else, I sure had a smart team. We’d play club teams, military service teams, junior colleges, anybody who had a team. And I mean anybody.”

Playing one or two matches a week, Scates would pile the entire eight-man team into his 1947 Mercury woody station wagon, a car he had picked up for $25, which didn’t include the Army surplus canvas top he had to buy to keep out the winter rain.

“That was the team bus,” Scates said. “We’d jump in and head off to Pt. Mugu for a couple tournaments each year, and to just about anywhere we could get a match, including San Francisco to play against club teams.”

In his first season as coach, Scates wanted to maintain his amateur status and therefore he would accept no salary. This was fine with UCLA Athletic Director Wilbur Johns, who would offer no salary.

“I told Mr. Johns that I wanted to remain an amateur so I could keep playing volleyball and I didn’t want to get paid,” Scates said. “He told me, ‘Al, you’re the kind of man we’re looking for. You’re hired.’ ”

Scates got his introduction to volleyball at Santa Monica College. The handshake lasted 15 minutes. Then he got cut from the team.

“I played football there and we had just won the Junior Rose Bowl,” Scates said. “I was a good athlete and the volleyball coach was also the football coach. I figured he liked me. Then he cut me during warmups. It was the first time I had ever been cut from a team, but there were a lot of good beach players trying out for the team.

“I really wanted to play volleyball, so I went down to the beach for a year and learned how to play.”

He transferred to UCLA in 1959 and made the Bruins’ volleyball team. He played through the 1963 season and then earned a berth on the U.S. team. While coaching at UCLA, he continued to play the sport. He was an alternate on the U.S. Olympic team for the Mexico City Games in 1968.

“But by then I had a wife and a baby and just couldn’t afford to keep playing,” he said.

He began to devote all of his time to the UCLA job, turning the Bruins into a perennial national powerhouse. In addition to his 11 national championships since the sport was sanctioned by the NCAA in 1970, Scates has also engineered the only unbeaten seasons in NCAA volleyball history. He did it in 1979, 1982 and 1984. His team’s 1984 record of 38-0 set the NCAA record for wins in a season.

Victories tonight against Ohio State and Saturday in the final would equal that win total. The Bruins are 36-3, and Scates has piled up a remarkable 671-91 record at UCLA.

“This is one of my best teams ever,” he said. “It does everything well.

“It really doesn’t have any weaknesses.”

There’s something else the 1987 UCLA volleyball team doesn’t have any of: old basketball uniforms.