MELLOWING : Trakh Works to Soften His Rough Edges While Adding to His Lofty Record at Brea

At his best, Brea-Olinda High School girls’ basketball Coach Mark Trakh has been described as a perfectionist and compared to Laker Coach Pat Riley--cool under fire, a scholar of the game who is building a dynasty.

At his worst, Trakh has been criticized as a workaholic and a high school version of Bob Knight, who screams unmercifully at his players, tears towels and throws water bottles and tantrums during games.

Finding the real Mark Trakh is difficult. There is no doubt he is consumed by basketball. He tapes every basketball game on ESPN that he can’t watch so he can study it later. He wears a T-shirt that reads “On the eighth day, God created basketball.”

Said Rick Jones, boys’ coach at Brea: “If he ever gets married, Nike will probably be his best man.”

Trakh is a man in transition. He is trying to escape the image of a vein-bulging screamer.

“I don’t like that image,” Trakh, 33, said. “I would rather be seen as somebody who is gentle with the girls rather than somebody who is yelling and screaming and being crazy on the sidelines, because I don’t think that is altogether true anymore.”

His dedication to building a program at Brea is unquestionable. Before Trakh, the Brea girls’ team had won only 4 of its previous 53 games. Since taking over the program in 1980, Brea is 203-33 and has become the dominant girls’ program in Orange County.

Brea has won the Orange League title the past six seasons, advanced to the Southern Section final four times, the semifinals and quarterfinals once each and won the 3-A championship in 1985-86.

His was the first county girls’ team to be ranked nationally by USA Today (15th in 1984-85 and 13th in 1985-86). Crowds pack the stands to see the Lady Cats’ home games.

Trakh is quick to attribute much of his teams’ success to junior programs of the Brea Police Athletic League and the Pole Cats, a traveling all-star team for seventh- and eighth-grade girls.

But Trakh is the coach who turned things around at the high school. And with that success came scrutiny from parents, boosters and the media.

“I never envisioned having the girls’ version of Mater Dei basketball,” Trakh said. “. . . All I wanted was my little girls’ program and all of a sudden the publicity comes and we’re big, and I’m not ready for that, and I’m not ready for people who were criticizing the program. I needed a maturing process. I went through a lot of growing pains.”

Trakh’s detractors say his style, which included screaming at his players, was too harsh.

“I think as a motivational tool, he needs to harness (the yelling) a little more effectively,” said Tom Egan, president of the Lady Cat Booster Club from 1985-87, his daughter Carrie’s junior and senior years on the team.

“It is almost on the fringe of a tantrum, and at that point it loses all impact. He has put towels on his head and stomped on the sidelines and thrown water bottles . . . “

Said Da Houl, who played for Trakh from 1980-83: “You better get out of town when he is at his worst. When he is mad, his looks can kill. Don’t even glance at him.

“He gets mad a lot, upset a lot and it all has to do with basketball. Basketball is his life. He always wants things to go perfectly.”

Carrie Egan, who is on an athletic scholarship at Cal Poly Pomona, remembers some players leaving practice on the verge of tears.

“I think that you can get your point across without really jumping down somebody and saying things that they might take personally,” she said.

Trakh defends his intensity, but in the past 2 years he says he has tried to stop screaming so much at his players.

“The bottom line is I am intense,” Trakh said. “I can’t change totally. I am still going to get up and try and get after them to play really, really hard. I can’t change to the point where I just sit there.”

Trakh contends that losing by large margins (before his arrival) hurt the self-esteem of the players a lot more than his screaming and yelling ever did.

His players might not like his screaming, but they do like to win and most of them like him.

“He is a great motivator. He motivated us to the point that we wanted to play for him,” said Houl, who attended the University of Hawaii on an athletic scholarship and now is an assistant coach at Katella.

“He gave us help in building our characters and teaching us to be ladies out there. It was neat back then. When I was there, you got this special feeling that it was a privilege to be an athlete at Brea, especially to play basketball there. He gained respect for us from the whole town.”

And respect from his peers as well.

“What Brea-Olinda is getting is someone who gives 100% of his being,” said Herb Livsey, an assistant at Orange Coast College who gave Trakh his start in 1979 as a sophomore boys’ coach at Western when Livsey was varsity coach.

“(Coaching basketball) is what he enjoys, so he is looked at as a basketballaholic,” Livsey said.

Said Brea’s Jones: “I don’t think he gets near the credit he should as a basketball coach at Brea. He works his tail off.”

Brea Principal Jean Sullivan has kept an eye on Trakh’s method since his arrival. She said she used to cringe as she sat in the stands witnessing Trakh scream.

“What I did was check with the athletes and as long as they were saying they didn’t consider it harmful or abusive, it was fine,” Sullivan said. “The girls invariably would say ‘This is what works. If he isn’t yelling it means he doesn’t care.’

“I’m pleased to see the mellowing and the maturing, but I don’t want him to lose the intensity. I don’t want him to stop caring and to stop being passionate about the game.”

The new Trakh is the result of a concerted effort by assistant coach John Hattrup and Trakh to phase out unnecessary yelling.

“I think that both of us, when we were younger, were much more active,” said Hattrup, who compiled a 215-56 record in 10 years and won two Southern Section titles as the girls’ basketball coach at Mission Viejo High School before signing on as Trakh’s assistant last season.

“We yelled more. We were more intense. And I think we have both grown up and matured. We are able to do it with other means without being as vocal.

“I think it is a rap that both of had that isn’t true, because they (crowds) only see what goes on at the game. They don’t see what we do for the kids off the court and in the classroom. . . . They only see a guy yelling at a kid.”

Off the court, Trakh is quite a bit more laid back.

“He has a different personality as a friend than he does when I see him on the sidelines,” Livsey said. “As a friend he is quieter, he smiles, which he doesn’t ever do when he coaches.”

Aimee McDaniel, a junior point guard this season, said that off the court Trakh is a guy who tells old jokes and talks a lot about basketball. “His favorite team is the Celtics and mine is the Lakers, so we always fight about that. . . . He’s just like a normal friend off the court. He will take some of us to lunch or to a basketball game or something like that.”

Susan Tousey, a senior center on the 3-A championship team, says most people don’t see the real Mark Trakh. She remembers him as someone who cooked hamburgers at team pool parties, who lifted weights with the team and tried to make conditioning fun.

“He always wanted the team to be together,” said Tousey, a scholarship player for Pepperdine’s basketball team.

“He used to tell us before a real big game, ‘This team puts their underwear on the same way we do.’ He was a lot of fun. You laughed a lot in practice.

“A lot of people only hear him outside on the court and that is not the real way that he is. They don’t hear the fun and the things off the court.”

Trakh’s roots are in the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea in the Soviet Union. His grandparents fled to Amman, Jordan to escape the Communists in 1918. Trakh was born there and lived there until he was 4. He speaks fluent Circassian--a Russian dialect--and Arabic.

His family moved to Connecticut briefly, then on to Patterson, N.J., where Trakh grew up with his younger brother Maz, now 26.

The neighborhood kids were always playing sports.

Mark was the sixth man for Lakeland High School. “Don’t print that,” Trakh said. “My kids think I was a star,” he said, referring to his players.

“I was a role player. I knew if I dove for loose balls and passed to Danny McAvoy, our star player, I would stay in the lineup. But if I shot, coach would call me everything but my name and I would be on the bench.”

Even then, Trakh coached his younger brother’s seventh-grade team and various youth teams. “We always knew he was going to be a coach,” said Maz, who is a part-time assistant for the Cal State Long Beach men’s basketball team.

The family moved to California in 1976, but Mark stayed behind a year at Fairleigh Dickinson University before transferring to Fullerton College and then Cal State Long Beach.

He majored in journalism, was the Fullerton College Hornet sports editor and a free-lance writer for the Daily News Tribune in Fullerton.

It was when he was writing sports for these newspapers in 1978 that he decided he didn’t want to write about basketball, he wanted to coach it.

In 1979, still working on his teaching credential at Cal State Long Beach, he met Livsey, then the boys’ varsity coach at Western.

“He just kind of came in the gym one day,” Livsey said. “I got to know him and liked him and asked if he would like to work with some of the younger players.” Trakh got his first high school coaching experience with the boys’ sophomore team in the 1979-80 season.

He was good at it, Livsey said. “He had a feel for it and he liked it.”

But Trakh wanted to be head coach of a varsity team, even if he had to switch to a girls’ program to do it.

In 1980, he was offered the girls’ coaching position at Brea as a walk-on while he completed work on his teaching credential.

“I was only going to do it for a year,” Trakh said. “What happened is, I got close to Da Houl, who was a sophomore my first year. I coached her through her sophomore and junior years, and her senior year, they moved to Riverside.

“She said, ‘If you stay here and coach me my senior year, I promise that I will drive from Riverside, back and forth every day, and play here.’ She did that. That was the first year we went to the CIF (Southern Section) finals.”

More players came through, and Trakh kept getting attached to them. “I basically stayed for the kids,” Trakh said. “That is sounding corny and mawkish, but that is it. It was really, really fun. I loved it, and I enjoyed it.”

Trakh has applied for head coaching jobs at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Hawaii without success.

“I love the job. I love the program. I love teaching there, and darn it, I get along with the kids and parents and administrators and everything else. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be there right now, I wouldn’t be there 9 years.”

TRAKH’S RECORD AT BREA-OLINDA

YEAR RECORD LEAGUE PLAYOFFS 80-81 12-9 Fourth Did not qualify 81-82 21-5 Second Lost in 2-A first round 82-83 24-3 Champion 2-A runner-up 83-84 29-2 Champion 2-A runner-up 84-85 29-1 Champion 3-A runner-up 85-86 25-4 Champion 3-A champion, reached first round state 85-86 24-4 Champion 3-A semifinalist 87-88 27-2 Champion 3-A quarterfinalist

Brea-Olinda is 11-2 this season.