Coaches Strain to Find Merits of Softball Tiebreaker

It led to a rather sleepless night, but Will Thurston, coach of the Moorpark College softball team, is thankful that the Lady Raiders were forced to play out what was eventually a 21-inning, 2-1 victory over Cypress College in the state junior college championship tournament last weekend at Golden West College in Huntington Beach.

Win or lose, Thurston says that he still would have been opposed to using an international tiebreaker rule to lessen the likelihood of marathon extra-inning games.

The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. uses the tiebreaker, in which the player who makes the last out of the eighth inning is placed at second base to start the ninth.

“I feel like having a tiebreaker rule is an artificial solution to ending a game,” Thurston said. “I think you just have to go on playing as long as it takes.”

In Moorpark’s case, it took six hours and ended at 2:30 a.m.

Cal State Northridge Coach Gary Torgeson also is opposed to the rule, calling it “a slam to women’s sports.” Torgeson contends that baseball and softball games should be settled in the same manner.

“Why do something for the men and not for the women?” Torgeson said. “Play it out. Playing under the tiebreaker is like playing a whole different game.”

Northridge was knocked out of last year’s national tournament, losing in a tiebreaker to Lock Haven (Pa.) State. The Lady Matadors lost another key game this year under the tiebreaker format, losing a game in the West regional to Cal State Bakersfield, the eventual national champion.

Northridge, however, also has won its share of games using the rule, Torgeson said.

“The more I see it and have been in it, the more I don’t like it,” he said. “I’m not sour-graping it. I’m saying it’s a bad rule for women’s sports. The rule does nothing for the game except end it.”

Torgeson said that he spearheaded a drive to eliminate the rule in 1984, shortly after it was adopted.

“I told them to approach it on a Title IX thing,” Torgeson said. “The men and the women should get the same treatment.”

Add marathon: De Dow had pitched both games of a doubleheader before, but even that didn’t prepare her for Moorpark’s game against Cypress.

Dow pitched all 21 innings of the game, in which a state record for innings played was set. Cypress held the previous record, a 20-inning affair played earlier in the tournament. The Lady Chargers had all of an hour to rest before playing Moorpark.

For Dow, it was an experience she won’t soon forget.

“We were all getting cold and my fingers were stiffening up,” Dow said. “I remember somebody asked for the time when it started getting late and I didn’t even want to know.”

Dow, the winningest pitcher in Moorpark history, pitched 28 innings in two games Saturday and picked up three victories at the state tournament to finish 30-7.

Re-staking her claim: Samantha Ford may have waited until just the right time to make her move.

Ford, a senior pitcher at UCLA who played at Hart High, is 10-1 with eight shutouts and a team-low 0.16 earned-run average for the top-ranked and defending national champion Bruins, who are competing in the NCAA Division I softball championships this week in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Last season, Ford was 18-4, but this season she has been third in the rotation behind junior Lisa Longaker (17-1) and freshman Tiffany Boyd (16-2).

After pitching in just five of the Bruins’ first 27 games, Ford has come on strongly. Earlier this month, she struck out 15 while pitching a perfect game against Oregon State, the first by a UCLA pitcher since 1985.

Last weekend in the West regional at UCLA, Ford earned a win against Cal State Long Beach by pitching four innings of scoreless relief. She has not given up a run in her past 25 innings.

Timely contributions: Three athletes from Valley-area high schools scored points for the UCLA men’s track team last weekend in Palo Alto as the Bruins captured their third consecutive Pacific 10 Conference title.

Freshman Jay Bettinger, a 1988 graduate of Chatsworth High, took third in the pole vault, clearing a personal best of 17-0 3/4. Bettinger, who won the City Section title last year, cleared the same height as Washington State’s Patrick Johansson, who finished second, but had more missed attempts.

“We’ve been anticipating that Jay would clear 17 feet soon. We feel he has a great future,” UCLA Coach Bob Larson said.

UCLA received more help from an unexpected source when David Bunevacz, a transfer from Glendale College, took third in the javelin with a personal best of 220-11.

Bunevacz had not met the qualifying standard for the meet, but Art Venegas, a Bruin assistant, persuaded Larson to designate the the sophomore as UCLA’s lone at-large entrant.

“David taking third was one of the big turnarounds for us early on,” Larson said.

John Knight, a junior from Oak Park High, finished sixth in the hammer with a throw of 202-7.

Steven Fleischman and staff writers Ralph Nichols, Mike Hiserman and Gary Klein contributed to this notebook.