After Lean Season, Titans Reveling in Lap of Luxury : Basketball: Last year Fullerton’s ranks were thin, but this season it has a full complement of players and coaches.

Titan Gym somehow seems crowded these days, with 15 players on the floor, a head coach without the word acting appended to his name, two full-time assistant coaches and one graduate assistant.

In the days after George McQuarn’s sudden resignation as Cal State Fullerton’s basketball coach during preseason practice last year, the scene was very different.

John Sneed, the assistant who suddenly became the head coach, was tense and overwhelmed. With defections and injuries, he once had only nine players. His one assistant, Donny Daniels, often had to participate in drills.

But as the Titans prepare for this season’s opener against Lamar Nov. 24, Sneed has all the comforts he lacked last year.

After the Titans’ remarkable 16-13 season that included an upset of Nevada Las Vegas, he is a coach with a three-year contract and four returning starters--Cedric Ceballos, a first-team all-Big West Conference forward who led the league in scoring, plus guard Mark Hill, point guard Wayne Williams and center John Sykes.

Daniels, his assistant last season, is now an assistant at Utah. But Sneed has two new full-time assistants in Dan Dion, formerly at New Mexico State, and Keith Starr, formerly a volunteer assistant at UNLV.

And one last luxury, he has players, plenty of them.

“I have competition for positions,” Sneed said. “I didn’t have that last year. On given days, we have 15 guys on the floor. That’s a big asset for drills. We don’t have guys going both ways. And we won’t have starters taking turns on the scout team during practice.”

Fullerton must replace only one starter, forward Derek Jones, the team captain who played last season after recovering from critical wounds suffered in a drive-by shooting more than two years ago.

One possible replacement is Agee Ward, a 6-foot-5, 225-pound sophomore who was ineligible last season under Proposition 48, the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.’s freshman academic eligibility regulation. Ward has been slowed during preseason practice by an ankle injury.

Another is Ronnie Caldwell, a 6-8 junior transfer from Washington who was a starter on Crenshaw High School’s 1985 and 1986 state championship teams. He can become eligible in time for the Titans’ fifth game, which is against Cal State Northridge Dec. 16.

Still another possibility is David Moody, a fifth-year senior who has played mostly center for the Titans but who, Sneed says, could play power forward in a big lineup.

Fullerton has seven new players, five of them on scholarship, giving the Titans’ depth they didn’t have last year, when four starters averaged more than 33 minutes a game.

Most important, Sneed has those starters back--Ceballos, the high-scoring, crowd-pleasing small forward who averaged 21 points and nine rebounds a game; Hill, an outside shooter who broke a number of Fullerton records for three-pointers; Williams, the freshman point guard who hit the shot that beat UNLV at the buzzer and who has filled out over the summer; and Sykes, the erratic center who Sneed says is now playing the best of his career.

The Titans, who have been picked to finish fourth in the Big West behind UNLV, UC Santa Barbara and Cal State Long Beach in many preseason polls, make their first public appearance in an intrasquad scrimmage Nov. 8 at Titan Gym.