Coaching Quartet Spins Victory Tune : Basketball: Jeff Dunlap has turned around the College of the Canyons women’s team by assembling a staff of assistants that includes a disc jockey, a grade-school teacher and a software distributor.

Frank Sontag fields a variety of questions during his late-night show on KLOS-FM, but one he received last summer was particularly unusual, given the political and issue-oriented nature of the program.

How good, the caller wanted to know, would the College of the Canyons women’s basketball team be this season?

Sontag’s guests were a pair of former UCLA basketball players, Jeff Dunlap and Jack Haley, who were talking about a basketball camp they run together.

However, the question wasn’t entirely a non sequitur .

Dunlap also happens to be the women’s coach at Canyons, so he told his inquisitor that he had a freshman-dominated team and hoped it would gel.

The caller wasn’t someone with a passing interest in Canyons basketball, but was instead someone whose passing was in the best interests of Canyons basketball, freshman point guard Keira Irwin.

Sontag also has more than a passing interest in Canyons basketball. When he isn’t spinning records at KLOS, he has been working as Dunlap’s top assistant and helping Canyons build a school-record, 10-game winning streak.

Canyons (10-1) already has won twice as many games as it did in the previous two seasons combined.

One reason for the turnaround from back-to-back one- and four-victory seasons is the coaching staff Dunlap has assembled. It’s one of the largest and most eclectic in women’s junior college basketball.

“One of the great things about it is I don’t think you’ll see a four-man staff anywhere in junior colleges,” Dunlap said. “I’m just lucky I’ve got three people willing to sacrifice their personal pleasures and put their hearts and soul into the basketball team.”

Dunlap lettered three years in basketball at UCLA and now also does play-by-play for a cable television station in Torrance. Sontag has a Monday-morning interview show called “Impact” at KLOS, does some disc jockeying and pinch-hits on newscasts. Second assistant Cathi Cornell, a grade-school teacher and promising young referee, and volunteer assistant John Tabanera, a software distributor, round out the staff.

Although it might seem easier simply to take Interstate 5, this coaching quartet has found that all roads to Canyons lead through North Hollywood High. Dunlap and Tabanera were teammates there and played for then-assistant coach Sontag on a 19-5 squad in 1979-80. Dunlap plucked Cornell off the North Hollywood High girls’ coaching staff before this season, and Cornell brought Michelle Cabaldon, one of her North Hollywood players, with her.

The pioneers of the staff, Dunlap and Tabanera, have been with the team since Canyons was abysmal. Dunlap was working as an assistant for men’s coach Lee Smelser when coach Randy Yamamoye quit the women’s team shortly before the beginning of last season. Dunlap added the women’s job to his duties and has continued to do both.

Tabanera joined Dunlap in January because Canyons, then down to six players, simply needed another body for practice.

Tabanera still works out with the players, and each coach on the staff plays a different role, on and off the floor.

Dunlap says Tabanera, a buddy from their days at North Hollywood, knows Dunlap’s system better than anyone else and “is also a good friend to the kids. You need a coach who’s a good friend. You need a coach who’s a mediator.”

Cornell, who deals with defense, played for Pierce in the 1983-84 season and for Valley the next season.

“I think playing on that level I know what it’s like for the girls,” Cornell said. For advice, the players “will come to each of us depending on who they click with more, (but) I don’t think I have any particular role being a female.”

Sontag and Dunlap also remained close after their days at North Hollywood. As the oldest coach, Sontag, 34, is the sage but is also, as Irwin says, “the enforcer.”

His only previous coaching job was at North Hollywood, but he has found his radio skills germane to coaching.

“The talk show helps me deal with people,” said Sontag, who will occasionally plug Canyons basketball on the air. “I think that’s a definite asset. Coming on the court I develop a real rapport with the girls.”

Dunlap played for Walt Hazzard and Larry Farmer, but he delves a little deeper into UCLA history for inspiration. Although he never played for him, Dunlap said former UCLA Coach John Wooden has been a primary influence.

“I call him from time to time,” said Dunlap, who keeps a framed copy of Wooden’s Pyramid of Success on his office wall. “I’ll ask him about a press, a trap or a part of his offense, and he’s always willing to help.”

Dunlap has coached at Wooden’s summer basketball camp for 10 years and at Laker Coach Pat Riley’s for six. He says that he has tried to amalgamate Wooden’s time-tested philosophy on life and coaching with Riley’s space-age transition tactics.

Dunlap himself has the coaching cachet of being a former Bruin. He once started against DePaul on national television, and he tries to give his players a sense of the excitement and prestige of major-college basketball.

“I pride myself on running this thing as close to a Division I program as I can,” said Dunlap, who has incorporated mandatory study hall and other vestiges of major-college basketball into his program. “I think we’re doing this a lot differently from community colleges.

“We treat them as if they’re going through a big-time program . . . It’s all done on the up and up. We just try to treat them a little better.”

With four coaches on the bench, Canyons has the look of a university team, and, according to Irwin, the staff is Argus-eyed.

“They can catch everything,” Irwin said. “While (Dunlap) is instructing someone else, you can go and ask (another coach).

“In practice, if all four of the coaches are watching, you’ve got all those people to correct everyone.”

Dunlap remains the final arbiter, and, although he says he was “a little leery” of having four coaches, “It’s just really become comfortable very quickly, and it’s become comfortable for the girls. . . . Our chemistry as a staff is just as important as chemistry as a team.”

None of the four are getting rich coaching Canyons basketball. As a volunteer, Tabanera is probably losing money in the proposition. Yet Dunlap has managed to put together a competent, motivated staff that might well direct Canyons to its first state playoff berth in 13 years of women’s basketball.

“Kind of hard to believe at a junior-college level,” Sontag said. “We’ve got a crew, and we’ve got a team, and come spring people are going to be saying, ‘God, where did they come from?’ ”