Toro Assistant Coach Is Ahead of the Game : College basketball: Bart Yamachika, 23, has been coaching at Cal State Dominguez Hills for five years. His future, players and peers say, is unlimited.

The scenes were getting ugly a couple of weeks ago as the Cal State Dominguez Hills men’s basketball team wallowed in its season-long doldrums.

After a 1-4 start in the California Collegiate Athletic Assn., the Toros had dropped to 5-13 overall, on a pace to become the first team in the school’s history to lose 20 games.

“Don’t count us out yet,” assistant coach Bart Yamachika stoically told a reporter after a crushing four-point loss to 11th-ranked Cal State Bakersfield. “Don’t count us out.”

Three straight victories later, the Toros went into this weekend’s games tied for third place, playing their best ball of the year and becoming the talk of the CCAA. Now a playoff spot appears likely.

The 23-year-old Yamachika’s optimism in the face of what appeared to be insurmountable odds wasn’t surprising to those who know him. His keen mind is like a sixth sense, they say.

“He’s so bright, he can see pitfalls before they happen,” said Anne Schwab, one of Yamachika’s former teachers at Carson High School.

Toro head Coach Dave Yanai agreed: “He’s a sharp kid. A bright young man.”

Very young, by coaching standards, Yamachika is considered one of the South Bay’s up-and-coming basketball minds, a shoo-in for a head coaching job of his own. Yamachika is in his fifth season as an assistant to Yanai, having started as a volunteer team manager in his freshman year. He was top assistant by the time he could legally enter a bar.

“Bart is a hard-working, dedicated kid,” said Carson High basketball Coach Richard Masson, who coached Yamachika and later hired him as a “C” level coach when he was only 18.

“He’s very, very reliable,” Masson continued. “He gets things done without you having to tell him to do it twice.”

“He is a quick study,” said Yanai. “He learns by observation and experience.”

Yamachika credits his mental sharpness to his love for mathematics, his college major. He compares solving math equations with solving problems on the basketball court.

“There’s always a new problem out there,” he said. “To get to that answer is kind of neat.”

What surprises most people, however, is Yamachika’s ability to act years older than he is.

“He’s a young kid, but he has his own identity,” said Masson. “Bart has always been able to take charge of kids that were just his age.”

When he wasn’t yet 19, Yamachika entered the Dominguez Hills basketball program by boldly asking Yanai if he needed an assistant.

Yanai remembered Yamachika as a teen-ager, a scrappy little kid who had attended five of his summer basketball clinics at Dominguez Hills. The two discovered they had a lot in common.

“We go back a long way,” Yanai said. “He was right on campus, so I let him be a student assistant. . . . It’s now obvious he will be a head coach someday.”

Toro Athletic Director Dan Guerrero, then an assistant administrator, was impressed by Yamachika’s savvy.

“He was a real student of the game,” Guerrero said. “He gathered extensive knowledge. Dave (Yanai) relied on him quite a bit.”

Like Yanai, Yamachika is of Japanese descent, a rarity among college coaches. Yanai is the only active college head coach of Japanese ancestry in the United States and one of only a handful ever to coach on the college level.

Masson, an assistant to Yanai at Fremont High School in the early 1970s, sees similarities between Yanai and Yamachika.

“When he was younger, Dave was a little more flamboyant than Bart is now. But coaching-wise, philosophy-wise, they are the same.”

The two share the belief that education comes first, basketball second. Initially, Yamachika’s greatest asset at Dominguez Hills was his ability to tutor players in their studies while pursuing his own college degree.

Said Guerrero: “He spent lots of hours with the players. On weekends he would be in here working with them. That was not in his job description, and he was going to school too.”

Most of the players were four or five years older than Yamachika. Said Yanai: “In the early years, there were some players who kidded him. But after a while they forgot he was so young.”

Three years ago, Yamachika stepped up to the No. 1 assistant’s job--full-time work for part-time pay. He was still two or three years younger than the seniors on the team.

Said former point guard Derrick Clark, now a rookie assistant coach under Yanai: “We would tease him from time to time about his being younger than us. But you have to understand, Bart has had a great big role in this program, and we all respected that.”

Clark, 24, called Yamachika “a role model for me. I’m trying to watch and learn from him.”

Masson is not surprised by how well Yamachika has handled age differences.

“The youth factor. . . . It amazes me with Bart. Any young assistant coach that I have had has had trouble with the discipline aspect of coaching. It’s amazing that Bart has no problem with that.”

Yamachika, the youngest member of his family, including cousins, explains: “I was in an environment with older people. To tell you the truth, many times I am more comfortable with people much older than me than with people my own age.”

Yamachika disagreed with others’ assessment of his maturity: “I don’t know if I am that mature. I have a lot of faults.”

Making the basketball team at Carson High his senior year, Yamachika said, was his “greatest sports moment.”

It was also the only moment of a short-lived high school career.

A respected youth baseball player when he grew up in Carson, Yamachika still waited until his senior year to go out for an athletic team.

Then he chose basketball. Baseball, he said, “wasn’t fast enough for me.”

Masson tried to discourage him.

“He was not the most talented player, skill-wise. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think he would even make the team.”

But Yamachika stuck. He gutted out the punishing runs that Masson and other coaches use to weed out “wannabes” who lack the determination to play hard in practice.

“I remember (Masson) running us and telling us if we didn’t like it, ‘There is the door. You can quit.’ ”

Looking back, the experience paid dividends for both men.

Said Yamachika: “When you do something like that, you find out about yourself, what kind of person you are. You can cry and whine, or you can play hard. I learned a lot about myself that year.”

By his own admission, Yamachika was “the 15th man on a 14-man team.” He did not see much playing time.

Still, Masson said, Yamachika “surpassed all of my expectations. He worked his butt off.”

The experience persuaded Yamachika that he should go into coaching.

“I saw the positive things you can do in coaching. Success doesn’t always have to be with superstars.”

He learned discipline, too.

“If a guy was better than me, he was better than me. He beat me. But he didn’t beat me because of a breakdown on my part.”

It is a view Yamachika carries into other phases of life.

“Bart will be an outstanding coach,” said Guerrero. You can’t be disillusioned by his size or his lack of experience. He’ll get the job done. He relates well to people, and he is very respected here.”

The bungalow door swung open, but the diminutive Yamachika was lost in a swirl of students passing between classes at Wilmington Junior High.

The math whiz returned to the classroom recently, not to tutor but to teach full time. Recent state legislation allows school districts to hire people who do not hold teaching credentials in designated emergency subjects, such as math, where teachers are in short supply.

As part of the deal, Yamachika has to take a minimum of six college units each school year toward obtaining his credential.

His first assignment at Wilmington, in a bungalow at the back of the school, could be a scene out of the late television show “Welcome Back Kotter.”

“Yo, Yamachika.” A Latino youth hailed the new teacher in his sixth period pre-algebra class, a bouncy, racially mixed group that would test the patience of most adults.

Teaching mathematics--an important subject, yet one many students perceive as boring--is a challenge that Yamachika has met with fervor.

“I don’t think every new teacher can succeed as well as he has. He’s doing a very good job,” said Anne Schwab, now an assistant principal at the school.

Yamachika went into the teaching job cold. His only prior experience was on the gymnasium floor. So it was not surprising that, after the initial weeks, Yamachika adapted a teaching pattern that he learned from Yanai.

“I try to remember when I was a kid. I was kind of squirrelly in class. So I give these guys a little freedom to move around. Kind of like basketball. You teach them how to do something, but you have to give them a chance to make decisions on the floor as to how to do it.”

It took several weeks for him to realize his shortcomings in the classroom.

“I was too tough on them. Then I saw that only seven of 28 students were turning in homework. I loosened up a little bit. Grades went up, and now 75% of students are doing their homework regularly.”

Schwab called Yamachika “a native teacher.”

“Whatever method he is using, it works,” she said.

The mathematics position provides extra income to Yamachika, solving a problem for Cal State Dominguez Hills. The university, short on funds, could not offer Clark, its rookie assistant, coaching pay, although he had agreed to remain with the program while completing his degree.

When he took the math job, Yamachika solved Clark’s problem.

“Bart was still the No. 1 assistant coach here,” Guerrero said, and he could have kept the pay that went with the job. “But he forfeited the official title, so the pay went to Derrick Clark.”

Brian (Buff) Johnson looks more like a linebacker than a basketball player. For the past two seasons he has mostly spread his 245 pounds on the Toro bench, playing sparingly since he transferred to Dominguez Hills after two failed attempts at playing for small universities in the Southeast.

At Dominguez Hills the 6-foot-4 forward is known as Yamachika’s project. Johnson is an adept three-point shooter but never figured to gain more than a spot role. Then, two weeks ago, an illness to the team’s leading scorer, Robert Barksdale, forced Johnson into the starting lineup.

To Yamachika’s delight, Johnson has played a crucial role in the Toros’ turnaround, gaining confidence in each game.

The knock on Johnson, by his own admission, was that he could not always keep his head in the game.

“I kind of zone out, forget to concentrate,” Johnson said.

At the beginning of the year, Yanai assigned Yamachika to shepherd Johnson. When the big forward is on the floor, Yamachika shouts instructions at him. He also speaks to Johnson before practice and after games, reminding him of his responsibilities.

Yamachika’s tactic bore fruit in back-to-back games with Chapman College last week. On defense, Johnson helped hold the Panthers’ leading scorers under their seasonal averages. And when he got free on offense, he made enough long-range jumpers to keep the Toros in command.

“He keeps my mind on the game,” Johnson said. “You can’t tell the guy is 23 years old. He is so in control of what’s going on.”

Johnson, also 23, was quick to put Yamachika’s role at Dominguez Hills in perspective. The assistant coach knows when to be firm, he said, but can also joke around like one of the guys.

“He’s ahead of his time,” Johnson said. “And I don’t think the guy even shaves yet.”