College Notes : CCAA Looking for More People to Sit Up and Take Take Notice of Their Teams

The California Collegiate Athletic Assn. often skunks its Division II competition when it comes to winning NCAA titles. CCAA teams have dominated sports such as swimming, softball, cross-country and volleyball and have won titles in basketball, baseball, wrestling and other sports.

But in the shadow of the Pacific 10 Conference--as well as the Big West and the West Coast Conference--the CCAA (and Division II in general) is often ignored. And the conference’s most prestigious member, Cal State Northridge, is stepping up to Division I after this school year. What’s a conference to do?

In the CCAA’s case, a long-range planning committee--including various administrators from CCAA athletic programs--is looking into the weighty matters of realigning the membership and increasing exposure.

As Cal State Dominguez Hills Athletic Director Dan Guerrero, a member of the planning committee that met last week, says: “We say we’re the conference of champions, but we’re the only ones who know it.”

With Northridge leaving and at least one other CCAA team--UC Riverside--looking at moving up to Division I, the CCAA is wooing Cal State San Bernardino, an independent Division II school with a growing program, and has also been approached by UC San Diego, which now competes in Division III.

Whoever comes and goes, the CCAA will have a new look in the 1990s, and will probably have more competitive races without Northridge, a school that dwarfs most of the eight-member CCAA with an enrollment of 31,000.

Guerrero said San Bernardino, the fastest-growing school in the Cal State system, has approached the CCAA and is openly being courted. It is hoped San Bernardino can join the CCAA next year, which would make the school a full-fledged member by the 1991-92 season.

UC San Diego’s approach was more of a surprise but is being considered optimistically, with membership probably a little farther down the road than San Bernardino. “The committee is in favor of seeing both of those schools involved,” Guerrero said.

The other pressing point the committee discussed was expanded media attention. The CCAA would like to get a television deal for its post-season basketball tournament--a similar attempt last year turned into a confused fiasco--and is also working on a volleyball package.

“It’s an issue of image enhancement,” Guerrero said. “We’re pursuing TV exposure for the post-season (basketball) tournament, and we’re thinking of adding some type of conference volleyball tournament since we’re such a power nationally.” A volleyball tourney, the panel hopes, would have some television appeal. “Every time you turn the (cable) TV on, you see volleyball,” Guerrero said. “That would be a chance to showcase one of our strengths.”

The committee also is looking into expanding the responsibilities of the conference commissioner. Tom Morgan, a professor at Cal State Long Beach, is now the CCAA commissioner, which carries part-time status.

“We’re looking at increasing . . . the support base for the commissioner in order to be more visible,” Guerrero said.

One of the goals of the CCAA is to get more schools playing more sports. Women’s soccer, for example, is a relatively low-budget sport but is not played at enough CCAA schools to set up a conference schedule. Hence, Dominguez Hills, with one of the strongest teams in the country, needs to play an exceptionally tough schedule and maintain a high national ranking to be considered for a post-season berth. From the CCAA’s standpoint--and certainly Dominguez Hills’--it would be preferable to play a conference schedule with the winner getting an automatic NCAA playoff berth.

“We’ve talked about providing something in the by-laws where each school must have a certain number of sports,” Guerrero said. “But that’s preliminary. We need to know our composition for that.”

The one thing the committee knows for now is that in five years, the CCAA may look considerably different, and the power center will have shifted away from Northridge.

When it comes to volleyball, the West Coast Conference lives up to its name--with a bit of a stretch. A scan of the eight conference rosters shows all but about a dozen of the players coming from California, Oregon, Washington or Arizona.

The curious stretch is that eight players come from Alaska, several of them conference stars. Junior outside hitter Angie Rais, an Anchorage native at the University of San Diego, led the WCC in hitting percentage last year, whereas Sitka product Christy Martin, a senior middle blocker at Portland, and Palmer native Erica Cordy, a junior setter at Gonzaga, earned all-WCC honors. Cordy is one of three Alaska natives on Gonzaga.

Another Alaska product, freshman Karen Clapp, is red-shirting at Loyola. The Lions also boast the WCC’s only Hawaii resident, freshman Dana Bragado.

Pepperdine has the only East Coast native in the conference, all-WCC outside hitter Tami Seidenberg, who hails from the New York City neighborhood of Jamaica. Rare Midwest products include Pepperdine freshman Elaine Caraher from Orchard Park, Ill., and San Diego freshman Andrea Bruns from Apple Valley, Minn.

Jim Ellis, an assistant basketball coach to Paul Westhead at Loyola Marymount for the past four seasons, is stepping up to the pros this year. Ellis, 35, has been named a full-time assistant coach with the San Jose Jammers of the Continental Basketball Assn. Ellis, a volunteer assistant at Loyola since Westhead took over the program, was also a teacher in the Inglewood school system and an assistant coach of the Inglewood High basketball team from 1980 to 1984.

College Notes: Loyola Marymount Athletic Director Brian Quinn will appear as a guest panelist at 7:30 a.m. Sunday on KCBS-TV Channel 2’s “At Issue.” Quinn and USC sports attorney Denise Speaks will discuss NCAA legislation, including controversial Propositions 42 and 48, which deal with entrance requirements for student-athletes.

The West Coast Conference begins volleyball play next week. A poll of coaches foresees Pepperdine repeating as champ, followed by (in order) Gonzaga, Portland, Santa Clara, Loyola Marymount, San Francisco, St. Mary’s and San Diego.

Loyola volleyball player Janeice Stimpfig , who missed several matches with a knee injury, played briefly Tuesday night against Cal State Long Beach and hopes to be ready for the Lions’ conference opener next week.

Megan McAllister, the former Mira Costa High volleyball star, was voted most valuable player in the Volleyball Monthly Invitational held at Texas-Arlington. The USC hitter led the Trojans to the tournament title.