Money Trouble in Paradise : UC Irvine: Athletic deparment shake-up is designed to better manage finances for sports. But the changes have left some coaches and officials worried about future.

They used to think of it as the promised land. Sunshine and sea breezes. Modern facilities and honest-to-goodness student-athletes. They all agreed a couple of extra scholarships would help, but UC Irvine was still a darn nice place for a coach to make a name--heck, even a home--for himself.

Even the lack of funding couldn’t remove the luster from this little jewel on the UC chain. Most coaches saw enormous potential and tried to embrace the school’s under-budgeted, over-achiever image.

After all, who needs a lot of money when you can wear shorts to work every day?

Then, all of sudden, fiscal reality came to their little island in the sun and the winds of change ripped through this staid community like a hurricane.

The Irvine athletic department has been operating in the red for the past six or seven years, and last year, the deficit reached a total of $1 million. So the powers that be--Chancellor Jack Peltason and his advisers--decided to shift control of athletics from academic affairs to student affairs, a seemingly subtle move that had far-reaching ramifications.

Then the athletic director and two associate athletic directors resigned and Otto Reyer, student affairs’ top financial trouble-shooter, was sent in to work wonders with the books.

Horace Mitchell, vice chancellor for student affairs, is the interim athletic director, but Reyer--officially executive associate athletic director for finances--has assumed control of the day-to-day operation of the department, which offers 19 Division I sports and has a 1989-90 operating budget of approximately $2 million.

And a dark mood prevails in the halls of paradise these days.

Even Greg Patton, the ever-optimistic men’s tennis coach whose teams have been ranked in the top 10 in the nation each of the past three years--a man who often refers to Irvine as “heaven on earth”--admits his utopia could be vanishing before his eyes.

Asked if the morale of the Irvine coaching staff is as low as it has ever been, he whispered sadly, “Yeah . . . oh yeah .”

Patton didn’t have to whisper. It’s no secret that most Irvine coaches are unhappy, scared, frustrated, angry or at least uneasy about an uncertain future.

Diving Coach Conni Earley happens to be a member of the all-of-the-above category.

“There’s so much crap going on around here that everyone is laughing, tongue in cheek, but it’s sad,” she said. “They’ve told us in a meeting that they will balance the budget at all costs. Balancing the budget would not have been a problem, necessarily, but the way they’re continuing to go about it is not very professional.”

Some members of the Irvine athletic department wonder if the interim regime is dragging its feet in the attempt to fill the athletic director’s position that has been vacant since Oct. 1. (Mitchell has extended the deadline for accepting applications one month until Feb. 28 and says he hopes to name a replacement by “spring”).

“I can’t see going six months without an athletic director,” said Ted Newland, the water polo coach who won the national championship last season. “We’re definitely lacking leadership.”

. Some say budget cuts have been done in a capricious manner with little or no discussion beforehand. Others complained about Reyer’s intimidating management techniques, pointing to occasions when he berated secretaries in public and threatened coaches by hinting their jobs could be eliminated during budget cutting.

Two athletic officials--Bob Pomeroy, the associate athletic director for facilities, and Shani Brasier, an administrative assistant to the associate athletic director for development--already have been directly affected by the change in management.

Pomeroy, who maintains he has no idea why he is being phased out, was informed by Mitchell that his job would no longer exist after the department is restructured on June 30. Brasier, who has directed the department’s fund-raising activities almost single-handedly for almost a year since Craig Fertig resigned, made the mistake of arguing with Reyer over fund-raising philosophy.

She showed up at work one morning and was introduced to her replacement. Brasier was transferred and is now a receptionist in student affairs.

A new administration. Some budget cutting. And a couple of jobs are trampled in the shuffle.

Welcome to the real world, Irvine athletic department.

Otto Reyer, former director of financial aid in student affairs and one of the Anteaters’ biggest fans during his 17 years with the school, used to pay his own way to watch the men’s basketball team and men’s tennis team compete on the road.

Now, he has been assigned to balance the budget, not slap coaches on the back.

“The university is my career,” he said. “If the university says, ‘Otto, we need you in biological sciences,’ I go to biological sciences. Originally, I was going to come over here and work half time, dealing strictly with the fiscal aspect. Then, there were other changes (John Caine resigned as athletic director) and I took on the department, essentially.”

Reyer, who says he has not applied for the athletic director job and doesn’t “intend to at this point,” contends that he’s only doing his job and is “fascinated” by the flap he’s causing.

“I went to the coaches and said, ‘You tell me if there’s any place you can give some money back. I’m not going to give you a percentage, you know better than I where you might be able to make cuts.’ ”

Reyer had coaches sign their final budgets this year. Many, who had never really even seen their budgets before, didn’t ask enough questions before signing on the dotted line.

Mike Puritz, the women’s volleyball coach, signed a budget that included a $200 allotment for recruiting, not enough to bring even one recruit to campus for a visit.

Vince O’Boyle, the track and field and cross-country coach whose women’s cross-country team finished 10th in the country last fall, maintains that the lack of communication has definitely strained relations between coaches and the new regime.

“The thing that I’m concerned about is that people should be up front,” he said. “(Mitchell and Reyer) said they’d be up front and honest. So, if they’re going to move (Pomeroy) out, tell us. Maybe they think it’s none of our business, but if we’re going to lose an administrator, they should tell us. Don’t make us find out through hearsay.”

Reyer declined to comment on specific personnel issues, but he claims the communication between coaches and the administration is better than ever.

“Those are management decisions that the university makes,” he said, referring to Pomeroy and Brasier. “Some coaches want to know everything. If I leave my office to relieve myself, they want to know where I was.

“When I got here, I asked (the coaches) how often they met to discuss what’s going on within the department. They told me once a year. Now, we meet once every three weeks so they can get their concerns out on the table.”

Some of these open forums reportedly have been pretty lively, but several coaches and administrators say they have an uneasy feeling that Mitchell and Reyer consider everyone in the department to be incompetent and in some way responsible for the deficit.

“I think a lot of people are upset about the apparent perception of this department by student affairs,” associate athletic director Kaia Hedlund said. “They wanted us to go on a retreat so we could all get together.”

Hedlund, who has been at the university 10 years as both a swimming coach and associate athletic director, laughed.

“No one in this department has ever back-stabbed anyone else,” she said. “No coach ever wanted his program to succeed at the expense of another.

“We have some of the best coaches in the country here. Look at what people like Patton and O’Boyle and Newland have done, working with considerably less funding than the competition. These guys work their butts off because it’s a beautiful place and they see incredible potential.”

O’Boyle also said he recoiled at the notion that the coaches were somehow to blame for Irvine’s current budgetary woes.

“The coaches are being made to look as if we were the problem,” he said. “I mean I think Reyer has been supportive, but we didn’t cause this deficit. In fact, most of us inherited it.”

Reyer is not without allies in the coaching ranks. Baseball Coach Mike Gerakos, who admits he has heard plenty of complaints from his colleagues, says he has had no problems dealing with Reyer.

“To be honest, I’ve heard a lot of talk about the lack of leadership,” he said, “but really, during the transition, I haven’t lacked for any leadership in terms of who to talk to get things done. As far as communication, I’ve been able to communicate with Otto Reyer as well as any other administrator in the program.

“Sure, I’d like to know the direction the university plans to go with athletics. And, as a coach, you’d like to be kept abreast of everything, because you’re often directly affected. You look at other schools who change administrations and there’s usually some coaching changes too. So I’m sure that’s crossed everyone’s mind.”

That, according to Reyer, is the primary reason for the unrest rampant in Irvine’s coaching ranks.

“We’ve got some people concerned because there’s change in the air,” he said. “I met with two of my staff and mentioned that we would bring in a new computer program and there was immediate fervor up and down the halls.

“I love this place,” he said. “I’m trying to maintain it and make it a little better if I can.”

Academic affairs?

Student affairs?

Who cares?

So Peltason decided to move athletics from one position to another on his university depth chart. What does it mean to the coaches and, most of all, the athletes?

According to Mitchell, the decision was made for two reasons: to remove the role of chairman of physical education from the athletic director’s duties--which would open the door to candidates who didn’t meet the academic requirements for chair of P.E.--and to improve the department’s chances of getting a bigger share of the university’s financial pie.

“The first process was to decide what we want the athletic department to look like in the future,” Mitchell said. “That was a campus-wide discussion that involved the chancellor, the executive vice chancellor and a number of other people.

“It was my opinion that what we needed was someone with excellent credentials and background in athletics, primarily a manager of athletics, so we uncoupled the two positions to give us more flexibility.

“And before, the A.D. had to compete for resources with the dean of biological sciences, the dean of physical sciences and all those people and, clearly, athletics would come out as a stepchild in that kind of situation. We saw athletics as more of a student activity rather than an add-on academic program and thought it would get greater advocacy within the whole university budget process.”

A five-year plan to repay the athletic department’s deficit from general campus funds is under way, but Reyer admits there are no additional funds for sports in Irvine’s immediate future. And there are informed observers who say an added layer of administration--the new athletic director will answer to Mitchell, who will report to Peltason--won’t help in the search for high-powered candidates.

Most Division I athletic directors answer only to the school president, or in Irvine’s case, the chancellor.

“If we don’t get a strong athletic director in this department, we’re going to be in big trouble,” O’Boyle said. “I think there’s a good person out there. But he or she is going to have to be young enough and enthusiastic enough to make a five-, maybe eight-year commitment.”

Patton, who is a member of the search committee, said he believes that the interim regime is making a “conscientious effort to get a quality person who can rejuvenate and re-energize the program.”

But most coaches are anxiously settling into a wait-and-see mode.

“There was that shred of hope that things would get better with the changes,” Gerakos said. “The deck has always been stacked against us and now we’ve been told we’ll be on the shoestring budgets at least another year.”

Newland, who has been at Irvine since 1966 (the year after it opened) and has seen five athletic directors come and go, says his colleagues should try to get a little perspective on their problems.

He admits it can be frustrating, watching a dynamic, growing university with high-rise structures sprouting skyward on almost every corner of the campus, all the while wondering if athletics will die on the vine from neglect. But a lot can be said for hanging in there.

“I’m a survivor,” he said. “I know I’ll put it together with or without the proper funding. I’ve got problems fighting the NCAA’s move to curtail the amount of weeks we can work out. What’s going on around here is minor league. That’s what happens when you get out in the big world.”

The secure little world of Irvine athletics may be changed forever, but nobody seems to know for sure what lies ahead.

“We’re in a limbo right now,” Patton said. “It’s like that movie, ‘The Abyss.’ You just don’t know what’s down there. You don’t know if it’s something beautiful or if it’s a monster.