The Colleges : BUILDING BLOCKS : At Pacific Christian, a Dedicated Basketball Coach and His Determined Players Keep Climbing

The gymnasium at the First Baptist Church of Fullerton is small and dimly lit.

Players had better use caution while running the court. Brick walls line both sides of the court, each a little more than a foot from the playing surface. A playing surface that is well aged.

There are no grandstands, or seats of any kind, unless you count a small stage at the east end of the gym.

Occasionally the place must be sprayed for ants, and since ventilation is mostly from a propped open door or two, the odor lingers awhile.

In short, it’s not the type of practice facility where you expect to find a No. 1-ranked college basketball team.

But then, Pacific Christian College is not your typical top-ranked team.

The road the Deacons are on doesn’t exactly lead to the Final Four. There are no television contracts or athletic scholarships. And it’s doubtful there ever will be.

But Pacific Christian, which has an enrollment of approximately 600 students, will compete in the National Christian Collegiate Athletic Assn. Division II championship tournament, March 1-3.

Pacific Christian, located across the street from Cal State Fullerton, enters the tournament as the No. 1 seed after it won the West Coast Christian Athletic Assn. tournament over the weekend.

Considering the Deacons’ basketball history, playing for a national title is nothing less than amazing.

This is a school that dropped its athletic program in the mid-1970s. And when it was picked up again in 1980, men’s basketball was merely a club sport for three years.

There were some who still thought of it that way, until this season.

“I thought it was a club team when I tried out,” said freshman Bill Edwards, the team’s starting point guard. “I had no idea it was this serious.”

But Edwards didn’t know Coach Lee Erickson back then.

In two years, Erickson has made basketball a serious business at Pacific Christian. Erickson, a former assistant under Gene Smithson at Wichita State, has taken a diverse group of players and made them into what the school’s dean, Gary Tiffin, estimates is the best team in the school’s 60-year history.

“I expected us to improve on last year’s team, but not this much,” said Erickson, who guided the Deacons to a 13-20 record last year. “This team has come closer to reaching their abilities as any other I’ve coached.”

And that spans 21 years, at such schools as La Verne, Tabor (Kan.), Cal Baptist, Wichita State and Geneva (Pa.).

“I’ve traveled to other countries, lived in the Midwest and the East, but I’m really happy to be back in California,” said Erickson, who graduated from La Verne.

Erickson talks almost as if destiny brought him to Pacific Christian.

In 1986, after having just completed three years as head coach at Geneva, he came west for a visit. On a whim, Erickson swung by Pacific Christian, just to have a look.

“I had coached against Pacific Christian when I was at Cal Baptist, so I decided to stop in and see what had become of the school,” Erickson said.

What he found was an opening for a basketball coach and athletic director. Although, at the time, the position was just part-time, Erickson applied.

“I looked at his resume and wondered, why would this guy want to coach at Pacific Christian?” said Tiffin.

Erickson’s answer was the challenge.

“At Wichita State, we filled a 12,000-seat arena every night, and even at Geneva, we sold out almost every game,” Erickson said. “But it was exciting to come to a place where there was no gymnasium and a program that needed building.”

There is still no gymnasium, just First Baptist Church for practice and Cal State Fullerton for games. But the program is alive and prosperous.

The nucleus of the team is six players, all of whom average in double figures.

Edwards and forward Steve Welch, both graduates of Troy High School, walked on from Fullerton College, where they had spent two years. Neither had played since high school.

Senior center Burton Lalk graduated from Marina High School in 1981, then played one season at PCC before leaving school to work for his father’s engineering company. He returned in 1985 and began playing again.

Freshman forward Mike DeVries was an all-league player at Heritage High School but came to Pacific Christian for the education. He played pickup games with some of the team members, who talked him into trying out for the team.

Sophomore forward Brian Keiser came from Gresham, Ore., where a friend had told him about Pacific Christian.

Freshman forward Garrett Crayton was a starter for El Camino High School, which reached the San Diego Section 2-A finals last year. He is the only player of the six that Erickson recruited.

The one thing they all have in common is respect for Erickson and assistant coach Jim McDaniel, who was an All-American at Western Kentucky.

“They are the reason we’ve done so well this year,” Keiser said. “We actually don’t have the talent that some of the teams we play have, but we work well as a team.

The Deacons (29-5) won their first eight games this season, and their only losses have been against schools from higher divisions--NAIA and NCAA Division III. Along the way, they have beaten teams that were accustomed to easy victories over Pacific Christian.

“You can see their frustration,” said Lalk, the team’s starting center. “They’re just so used to dominating PCC.”

Said Erickson: “We don’t get many calls to play in homecoming games anymore.”

After a victory at Azusa Pacific, an NAIA school, the players began believing they could reach the national tournament. They breezed through conference play, winning all eight games, and defeated Life College, 66-55, to win the WCCAA tournament championship.

“I think the first part of the season caught the players by surprise,” Erickson said. “We played so many games early on that they didn’t realize the type of season they were having. All of a sudden, they woke up and started feeling some of the pressure.”

The Deacons stumbled a bit, losing four games in early January. But they finished the season by winning eight of their last nine games.

“We had a little rough spot to get over,” Erickson said. “But now we’re starting to roll again.”

Possibly to a national title.