Boyd Gets Only a Part of His Wish List for Chapman Basketball Team

In his first full season of recruiting at Chapman College, Coach Bob Boyd hoped to get help inside and outside for his basketball team. Last Wednesday, the first day players could sign national letters of intent, he got one but not the other.

Chapman signed two 6-foot-6 community college forwards, Alan Schlines of Orange Coast and Chris Warmerdam of Cabrillo College in Aptos, Calif. Both averaged 14 points and nine rebounds and should help spell the Panthers’ inside starters, Rog Middleton and Frantz Reyes.

“I think we have helped ourselves,” Boyd said. “We needed some support in there with Roger and Frantz, but we do need to get a couple of perimeter people.”

One player who got away was Cypress College’s Vince Hizon, the Orange Empire Conference player of the year. Boyd said Hizon, a guard/forward who averaged 15.2 points, had considered Chapman before choosing Boise State, a Division I school.

Boyd hopes to add two more players.

Recruiting at the Division II level has been a new experience for Boyd, who coached 20 seasons at Division I schools (Seattle, USC and Mississippi State).

“It’s quite a puzzle to solve,” he said. The situation at Chapman is trickier than most because the school offers only 10 scholarships--two less than the Division II maximum. And as the only private school in the California Collegiate Athletic Assn., it has the highest tuition costs in the conference.

“We really don’t have the opportunity to split up scholarships like a lot of the state schools in our league. You just don’t find anybody in a position, financially, to not go on full scholarship.”

Job searching: Chapman has four finalists its search for an athletic director: David Adams, a former athletic administrator at the University of Akron; Joseph Biedron, athletic director of Monmouth College in West Long Branch, N.J.; Dave Currey, an assistant football coach at UCLA who was football coach at Cal State Long Beach and athletic director and football coach at Cincinnati, and Kay Don, the senior women’s athletic administrator at Cal State Long Beach.

The finalists will be interviewed Monday, and college administrators hope to make a decision by May 1.

Another search: Christ College Irvine administrators want to hire a men’s basketball coach by next Tuesday. The final two of eight candidates will be interviewed this week. Estancia High basketball Coach Tim O’Brien, will be interviewed today.

Hard sell: Advancing to the National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics basketball tournament last month in Kansas City, Mo., for the first time hasn’t yet proved to be a boon for recruiting for the Southern California College men’s team.

“We like to think it might help,” said SCC Coach Bill Reynolds, who half-jokingly added: “I told my wife to keep the phone lines open. . . . But they aren’t knocking our doors down.”

Reynolds said he isn’t sure how helpful the postseason success will be for recruiting in the long run, but hopes it will at least ensure that more players will have heard of the school.

Staying hot: SCC’s baseball team dropped out of a tie for first in the Golden State Athletic Conference after losing to front-runner Cal Baptist, 6-5, last week, but catcher Denny Berni continued his stay among the conference’s hitting leaders.

Berni went five for seven with five runs batted in, raising his batting average to .418. He has nine home runs and 40 RBIs. In conference games, he is batting a conference-leading .531.

College Division Notes

High school softball pitcher Laurie Bauer of Butte, Mont., signed a letter of intent to play for Chapman. . . . Heather Mead, a Mater Dei High graduate and Saddleback College volleyball player, will attend Chapman, as will Andre Fahamivu (Faha) Banks, a 5-foot-6 point guard on the Santa Barbara City College women’s basketball team. . . . Christ College Irvine has hired Edward Brown to coach the men’s soccer team. Brown, who played soccer at Pacific Lutheran in Tacoma, Wash., has coached a number of youth clubs in the Pacific Northwest.