Community College Notebook : Rod Klopfer’s Patience and Persistence Pay Off

Rod Klopfer doesn’t have an impressive baseball past. Other than a little success in summer league, there was very little to indicate what he would do this season for Fullerton College.

In fact, there was a time last summer when it looked as if he might not play again.

Klopfer was stabbed in the side last May when he tried to help his brother, then a senior at Anaheim High School, who was in a fight in Anaheim. The knife wound was just deep enough to puncture his left lung.

His brother drove him to the hospital, where he spent three days in intensive care and five days total before being released.

“People always ask me if I have dreams about it or if it still hurts,” Klopfer said. “The only dream I had was that it hurts when I swing a bat. It all happened so fast that I really don’t really remember much of it.”

Klopfer was slow recovering from the injury last summer and struggled for the early part of the summer Metropolitan League season in June, hitting less than .200. He finally took a week off at the halfway point in July and rested in an effort to regain his strength.

Klopfer had three hits in his first game back and finished the season hitting over .350.

Over the summer, Nick Fuscardo, Fullerton coach, decided to try Klopfer, who had been an outfielder all his life, at first base.

This was an attempt to find a place for Klopfer in the lineup. He had sat on the bench last season behind three freshman outfielders who were all going to be back this season.

But Tim Churchill, who figured to be the starting first baseman, transferred to Cypress College during the summer.

Churchill is having an impressive season for Cypress, hitting .440, but Klopfer has been equally impressive for Fullerton. He leads the team with 10 home runs and 39 RBIs and is hitting .421.

These are much more impressive numbers than he compiled as a freshman last season. He hit .217 in 23 at-bats after he made the team as a walk-on outfielder and did some pinch-hitting.

“The great thing about Rod is that he’s the same guy he was last season,” Fuscardo said. “Even with all his success. Sometimes when a guy enjoys so much success, he starts to get a big head about it, but that’s not Rod. He still works as hard and maybe harder. He never complained once about not playing; he just worked hard and waited for his chance.”

Klopfer the baseball player was pretty much an unknown factor before this season. He had hit .200 as a senior at Anaheim High in 1985.

He decided to just attend classes at Cal State Fullerton in the fall of 1985. But after a semester there, he enrolled in an audio and video engineering school in Hollywood.

“After high school, most of my confidence was gone,” Klopfer said. “My grades weren’t too good at (Cal State) Fullerton, so I couldn’t see any reason to keep going there.”

Klopfer, who graduated from high school at 17, still had another season left of American Legion baseball and returned to play for the Anaheim high school team in the summer of 1986. Klopfer hit .350 and decided to try and walk on at Fullerton. He was almost cut as a freshman but was kept partly because of his positive attitude.

“I figured I could make it at Fullerton,” Klopfer said. “I had my confidence back and was ready to play. I realized that as a freshman, there were better players ahead of me, so there was no reason to complain. I just waited until I got my chance.”

Orange Coast’s baseball team has won six games in a row, including three last week, to move into second place in the Orange Empire Conference race. OCC is 21-12-1 overall and 6-3 in conference. Rancho Santiago (25-5, 7-2) and Cypress (24-6, 7-2) are tied for first.

One of the main reasons for OCC’s surge is the rest that the team received by not playing in a tournament over spring break.

“That’s really made the difference,” said Mike Mayne, OCC coach. “We were just really tired from playing so much. We have a lot of freshmen, and it’s hard for them to adjust to all those games. We got some rest over the break, and that, more than anything else, is the reason we are playing better right now.”

OCC played in four tournaments and played a total of 25 games before its conference play began. No other team in Orange County had played 19 games before the start of conference.

“I really look for them to come on and be in the race the rest of the way,” said Scott Pickler, Cypress coach. “We played them to start the season in the College of the Desert tournament, and it was a different team than the one we played the first time around in conference.”

Community College Notes

Laura Phillips, an All-American outside hitter for the Golden West women’s volleyball team, made an oral commitment the University of Hawaii, Al Gasparian, Golden West coach, said Tuesday. Hawaii is the defending national champion. Phillips was also an all-state and All-South Coast Conference player for Golden West, which finished third in the state last fall.