McCarthy Labors Out of the Limelight for New Mexico St. : NCAA tournament: Aggies coach has no quirky trademark, other than the fact he has nine 20-win seasons, including this year’s 26-4 team.

Lots goes into the making of a coach, but when it comes down to it, the public tends to remember him for odd things--what he does with a towel or a game program, and whether he wears sweaters or shirt sleeves, Italian suits or wild plaids.

Nobody seems to know very much about New Mexico State’s Neil McCarthy, partly because he lacks a quirky trademark, partly because he is a bit hard to figure, and most probably because he has spent his career in Ogden, Utah, and Las Cruces, N.M.

McCarthy, coach of the New Mexico State team that will play Loyola Marymount tonight in the first round of the NCAA West Regional at Long Beach Arena, is not a coach who can be readily pegged.

Watching him on the bench, there is little on which to fix. His tanned face is set off by gray hair, but he wears neutral jackets and ties. His teams are not much help, either. Whenever you seize on their style, you discover that the next season it is not quite the same.

But here is what’s worth noting: In 15 seasons, 10 at Weber State and five with the Aggies, McCarthy has had nine 20-win seasons. The current one, 26-4, put New Mexico State into the national polls, and the Aggies replaced Nevada Las Vegas as the top-seeded team in the Big West Conference tournament for the first time in UNLV’s eight seasons in the conference.

It also was enough to put New Mexico State into the NCAA tournament, something the Aggies didn’t accomplish last season despite a 21-11 record.

“We’re like Avis,” says McCarthy, 48, explaining the rigors of playing in a hidden corner of the Southwest. “We have to try harder.”

He has the Aggies back in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1979, when they lost a first-round game to--ready for a twist?--McCarthy’s Weber State team.

It has taken the people of Las Cruces a while to warm to McCarthy, who has a slight air of diffidence, a dry sense of humor and who declines to pander to public opinion.

“I’m not one of those coaches starved for media attention,” he said. “I never have been. I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything, made a conscious decision for money or for publicity. I’ve never been self-serving or self-promoting. But I am respected by my peers. I have a pretty glossy record (296-156). It’s just that I haven’t appeared on ESPN seven or eight times.”

Last year, despite a 21-win season, the Aggies drew only about 6,000 fans a game.

“They must have been home watching ESPN,” McCarthy said. “Last year, I thought we were really overachievers. The fans kind of never caught on.”

But with the early season upset of UNLV on Keith Hill’s leaning bank shot in the closing seconds--on ESPN, incidentally--the fans figured it out. Attendance increased by about 3,000 a game, and McCarthy strode into the Pan American Center to roars of approval. After the final home game, which drew 13,182 to see San Jose State, the team locked arms and bowed to ovations around the arena.

“This year, they love their Aggies,” McCarthy said.

One reason McCarthy’s reputation lags behind his achievement may be his tendency to change. Most coaches develop a system to which players either mold themselves or languish on the bench. But with McCarthy, the system always seems to be changing, with only one constant, the matchup zone defense.

As a high school coach, McCarthy used to require 20-25 passes before a shot. As a college coach, he has been both a fast-break coach and a slow-down coach, a pressing coach and a watch-them-bring-it-up coach.

“The key for Neil, why he’s so successful, is he’s not afraid to change,” said Dan Dion, a Cal State Fullerton assistant who played for McCarthy in high school in Northern California and worked under him at Weber State and New Mexico State. “He looks at the personality of a team, evaluates the talent and tries to coach it accordingly.”

The current outfit is an up-tempo team, although nothing in the style of Loyola. But it is in substantial contrast to McCarthy’s teams of a few years ago, which often scored in the 50s and 60s, occasionally even the 40s. This team has averaged about 80 points. They attack opponents with a three-quarter-court zone press, harassing a team’s half-court offense with traps, and sprinting out of it with every turnover, of which there was an average of 22 a game during the regular season.

McCarthy’s flexibility is in part a function of the name of his employer.

“I adjust to the players I recruit,” McCarthy said. “New Mexico State can’t always get great players, like UCLA. I have to devise a new system every year to fit the players we have. . . . I’ve always felt my job is to adapt to them, to minimize their weaknesses and maximize their strengths.”

This year, he has built a team from a collection of transfers. Of the Aggies’ top eight players, five are new to the team.

The player who has been around longest is guard Keith Hill, a senior, but even he started out at Michigan State, transferring before he had used any of his eligibility.

He and junior Randy Brown, who is in his first year with the Aggies after having played at Houston for two seasons, were chosen over Nevada Las Vegas’ Greg Anthony and Anderson Hunt as first-team all-conference guards.

Add to that pair swing man Reggie Jordan, a community college transfer from San Diego Southwestern College, and New Mexico State has a set of 6-4 players whose aggressive defense is the critical factor in the team’s matchup zone, and whose athleticism makes them a team that can run.

Inside, New Mexico State has Michael New, a 6-8 Chicago high school teammate of Brown who also started out at Houston but, like Brown, spent last season sitting out at a community college to get an associate’s degree.

The other inside player is James Anderson, a 6-8 senior who qualifies as a veteran because he had one year in Las Cruces before this year, after having played for two at Northeast Nebraska Community College.

McCarthy’s career has not followed a traditional schedule. By some standards, he spent too much time at Weber State, rebuilding the program twice in 10 years and passing up opportunities to move up to the Western Athletic Conference.

He remained there so long largely because of a personal tragedy, the death of his first wife, Lynn. She died at 32 after suffering an aneurysm, a rupture of a weakened artery wall. The youngest of McCarthy’s three children was 5, and the oldest, 15.

“It was really hard,” McCarthy said. “We tried to keep our family life together.”

McCarthy developed habits he still has, spending more time watching film at home than in the office, and getting much of his work done in the wee hours. When the team went on trips, friends came to the house to stay with the children.

“I didn’t have the luxury of thinking about basketball morning, noon and night,” McCarthy said. “I had to do the housekeeping, buy the groceries, spend time with the three children to try to help them through the process of mourning we all went through.”

McCarthy, who has since remarried, finally left Weber State for New Mexico State five seasons ago. He turned a 7-20 team into an 18-12 team, and hasn’t had a season below .500 there yet, despite losing six one-point games two seasons ago.

There is reason to think this could be McCarthy’s last year in Las Cruces. He is openly discouraged by the tightness of the program’s budget, and his name has been linked with other jobs, including Miami’s and Texas A. & M.’s

If there is one reason to think he might stay, it is money. McCarthy’s contract includes incentives of $10,000 for every regular-season victory in excess of 19, and another incentive for reaching the NCAA tournament. The catch is that he will not collect until his six-year contract expires--after next season.

If he does leave, perhaps finding his way into some larger media market or a better-known conference, his reputation-in-waiting may finally go beyond those who know him best, those who work with him and the coaches who compete against him, who voted him conference coach of the year.

“I’ve always felt that if Neil was in a conference with the so-called experts, the Big Ten or the Atlantic Coast Conference, it wouldn’t take him long to be considered one of the top coaches in America,” said Dion, his former assistant.