UCLA Women Row to Acclaim on a Shoestring : Crew: Salonites builds national program, but she is critical of school’s decreasing funding.

Kelly Salonites, the women’s crew coach at UCLA, was not having a great morning. It was barely daybreak at the university’s Marina del Rey boathouse, and Salonites had just told her team that, because of tight money, they would not race at Oxnard that weekend. Sending 35 women, plus boats, there for two days would cost several thousand dollars.

Now, as she took her varsity women for a workout in two boats of four rowers each, the engine on her coaching launch threatened to quit. Using her blue UCLA megaphone, she told the athletes to carry on without her if she could not make it up Ballona Creek to the turnaround point at the Lincoln Boulevard bridge.

Sure enough, a quarter mile up the creek, the old 25-horsepower engine wheezed, coughed and stopped cold, enveloping Salonites in a cloud of noxious white smoke.

The coach, oarless, calmly started paddling with her megaphone.

“It’s my life,” she shrugged, displaying a measure of the stoicism she gets from her Cherokee father.

“Luckily we’re drifting backwards,” she said. “This has been a good year. I’ve only broken down eight times.”

Eventually, the shells came back. One was maneuvered into position to tow Salonites to the dock. She directed the rest of the workout from a bicycle on the bike path parallel to the waterway.

It was perhaps fitting that rowers dragged the helpless launch and its disabled engine to safety. The human element is what keeps the UCLA women’s--and men’s--crew programs afloat.

Supporters of crew at UCLA believe that the university’s athletic department has a faint-hearted commitment to rowing.

The program has been building since Friends of UCLA Rowing (FOUR) hired Polish defector Zenon Babraj as coach in 1986, and, judging by results, UCLA crew has made it to the big leagues. Except for the University of Washington and occasionally California, West Coast crews have never been taken seriously by Eastern schools.

But now, UCLA’s men and women are ranked second or third in the nation; both are threats to win West Coast championships at Sacramento’s Lake Natoma this weekend--it would be the fourth consecutive year for the men--and national titles.

The women need a victory at Sacramento to earn a trip to the national championships in Madison, Wis., June 2-3, since the regatta organizers will pay expenses only for the Pac-10 winner. Other boats pay their own way.

“If we don’t win, we don’t go,” Salonites said. “UCLA isn’t providing any money for us to go the national championships.”

Besides success in collegiate crew, UCLA is adding to the pool of Olympic level rowers.

“What they don’t understand in the athletic department is that we are producing world-class elite athletes here,” Salonites said.

Kris Korzeniowski, national technical director of U.S. Rowing, spotted several new candidates for the national team in Salonites’ boats and has invited them to development camps.

In the varsity eight, besides stroke Cathie Heacox, a member of the national team, are two U.S. Olympic Festival medalists--Catriona Fallon of Burlingame and Leslie Lewis of Torrance. Coxswain Katy McMahon of San Francisco competed in the World Championships as a member of the U.S. junior national team. Leilani Johnson of Malibu attended the U.S. pre-elite camp in 1989.

A lightweight four is training under Salonites as well. Leslie Lewis of Torrance, Kim Cramer of Clayton, Heacox of Agoura and Kerry Conway of South San Francisco hope to earn the right to compete at the Goodwill Games or at the World Championships next fall in Tasmania.

Korzeniowski also said he would like to recruit Salonites to coach a national team boat.

“I think she’s a rising coaching star,” he said, noting that all rowers in her boats use the same technique.

“It’s not a fluke,” he said. “It’s the sign of good coaching.”

But just as the effort is paying off, the UCLA athletic department is backing off.

“We’ve moved the machine to the level of make or break,” Babraj said. “The profile of athletes has changed. There’s tremendous momentum.”

Salonites’ husband, Robert, a former UCLA oarsman and a fund-raiser for the program, said: “Kelly and Zenon will need double next year to sustain what they’re doing here. The game’s changing.”

Both coaches said it isn’t fair to expect the athletes to put out the kind of effort they do to support the program--some work three jobs--while training at such a high level and going to school.

Said Judith Holland, assistant athletic director in charge of 23 sports, among them crew: “We will continue with the core funding for rowing. It will not be (downgraded to) a club sport. It will not be discontinued. We will try to find ways to help. But our hands are tied.”

Such sentiments don’t impress Salonites, who feels strongly that UCLA should encourage and support the program.

“The chancellor said he wanted to maintain the integrity of the athletic department, that education is the most important thing.” Salonites said. “But small sports are suffering, not just rowing.

“Nobody wants to hear about rowing. But how many sports is it going to take to become extinct before people notice what’s going on at universities?

“The money is there,” she said. “They choose to put it somewhere else. It’s a policy decision. UCLA rowing is getting less than UC Davis and other California schools. We have developed the program to one of the best in the country.

“And we don’t ask for scholarships or any special help. It is not fair to place the burden on the athletes, their parents, the coaches and the alumni. We do all the work and the athletic department is taking all the credit when we do well.”

Rowing is not an NCAA sport. It is not a revenue sport. Except in the Ivy League and at the Division III level, it generally is low profile. And women’s crew, at most schools in existence not more than 15 years, is even less visible.

Of the $1.6 million designated for sports from student registration fees, the UCLA crew program receives $55,000 a year from the athletic department--$25,000 of which is for the women. Four years ago, the figure was $150,000 for men alone.

During a recent regatta at UCLA, Salonites could be seen dashing from her coaching duties on the launching dock to hawking wares at the T-shirt stand to checking yogurt supplies at the refreshment table.

Alumni groups, parents, rowers and coaches make up what the university fails to provide.

The men’s allotment from the athletic department goes strictly to support the boathouse. Salonites is paid $12,000 from the women’s allotment and $8,500 from FOUR. She raises the money to pay her freshman-novice coach, Marisa Hurtado, $6,000 for travel, insurance, gas and supplies.

Among the expenses the crew program sustains is the rental of trucks from UCLA to tow the boat trailer. The women pay their own expenses at regattas, buy their own uniforms and pay their air fare.

Still, Salonites, despite spending 70% of her time raising money for the women’s program, has produced a first-class crew.

On April 7 the varsity eight won the prestigious Whittier Cup at the San Diego Crew Classic, outclassing Cal, Stanford, Washington, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The women’s junior varsity boat also won.

“They were so busy celebrating it took a week for them to settle down,” Salonites said of her crew.

Several weeks later, at Redwood Shores near San Francisco, UCLA added Radcliffe to its hit list. Then, facing Princeton in the final, the Bruin women suffered their only defeat of the season.

Princeton Coach Curtis Jordan, who is also U.S. national team men’s coach, later wrote to Salonites:

“I was truly impressed with your crews’ rowing and more importantly their racing. . . . I was envious of the style you have taught them. It is a bold and powerful stroke that I think is very effective with women. It is difficult to teach properly, but you have done it. It took some courage to even try. Congratulations.”

Salonites, 28, is a bit overwhelmed by such accolades, since she is rather new to coaching. A 1985 graduate of UCLA with a degree in psychobiology, she rowed under coach Jean Riley, later training with national team coach Bob Ernst of the University of Washington. She won a gold medal at the U.S. Olympic Festival in Baton Rouge, 1985, in a pair with Heidi Hook.

She was assisting Riley and had been accepted to graduate school when Babraj asked her to coach the women.

“She had instinct,” Babraj said. “And trust from the athletes. She was energetic and willing to learn.”

Salonites said that Babraj taught her almost everything she knows about coaching.

“He’s always been very generous with his time, whenever I have a question,” she said. “He’s my encyclopedia of rowing.”

Salonites was named Pac-10 women’s coach of the year in 1989.

But as one of her athletes said: “They said if we won, things would change. Well, we’re winning, and things are the same.”