Longaker Comes Back Strong : Softball: After nearly quitting last summer, UCLA pitcher leads Bruins in national title hunt.

UCLA’s top-ranked women’s softball team will begin its quest for a third consecutive national championship today at 3:30 p.m. against Northern Iowa in the first game of a best-of-three series at Sunset Field on campus.

The Bruins (55-6) have won 25 of their last 26 games, the loss coming to Arizona in the final game of the regular season.

Starting for the Bruins will be senior pitcher Lisa Longaker, who was named Pacific 10 player of the year for the third time. Longaker was 18-1 with an earned-run average of 0.47.

“I’m excited to play Northern Iowa,” she said. “They are somebody new. We’ve always played other teams from Southern California in the first round of the playoffs, and this way we get to play somebody we haven’t seen before.”

Longaker was heavily recruited at Mayfair High in Lakewood, and made an immediate impact with the Bruins. She won her first Pac-10 player-of-the-year award as a freshman, going 20-5 with 213 strikeouts and an ERA of 0.35.

“We came so close when I was a freshman (losing in the tournament final to Texas A&M;),” she said. “Actually, I think that is what made my sophomore year so great.”

As a sophomore, Longaker was named the national player of the year when she was 31-4 with an ERA of 0.30.

“I would have to say that was my best year because I had so many games, and the pressure was on because one of our pitchers left school and another got mono(nucleosis) in midseason,” Longaker said. “So the pressure was on and I reacted.”

Although the Bruins won a national championship again when she was a junior, Longaker struggled for he first time in her college career. She was 18-1, but her strikeouts slipped to 114, fewer than half her sophomore total.

“I was struggling the whole year,” she said. “I think it was a mechanical problem at first, and then I waited too long and it turned into a mental problem.”

Longaker uses five pitches, her best pitches being a riseball and a fastball that has been clocked at 65 m.p.h.

According to Sharron Backus, the Bruins’ coach, Longaker’s strong suit is her control.

“Lisa has a command of all the pitches,” Backus said. “What distinguishes Lisa is her ability to put any of those five where she wants to.”

Longaker, whose father coached softball until last summer, began playing the game when she was 8. She started pitching when her family moved from Houston to Lakewood and, on the advice of a friend in the area, Longaker and her father went to see Ron Lefebvre, a pitching instructor in Anaheim.

“A girl who played for my dad in Houston played for Ron, so when she moved here, she told us to go see Ron if I wanted to pitch,” Longaker said. “My dad was the one to catch me six days a week, and Ron was the one we went to one or two days to learn how to throw pitches. He would tell me what I was doing wrong, and Dad would pick up on it.”

Longaker chose not to seek Lefebvre’s advice last season when she experienced trouble, deciding instead to live with it. Disappointed, she also decided to quit softball after the season.

During the summer, her father, who had retired from coaching, had a change of heart, got a team together and asked his daughter if she would like to play.

“How do you say no to your father?” she said. “I’ve never been able to do it.”

By the end of the summer, Longaker was pitching well again and shelved the retirement plans, for this season at least.

“I’m going to retire after this summer,” she said. “I’m going to play in the Olympic (Festival) and an international tournament in Illinois this summer, but then I’m going to retire.”

This season, Longaker pitched 11 shutouts, including a perfect game against Arizona State. Her only defeat was that 3-2 season-streak-ender against Arizona.

“They were on fire,” Longaker said of the Wildcats. “I would have had to (have) been extremely on to beat them.”

Now the task is to beat Northern Iowa, a team that seemingly has peaked at the right time. Northern Iowa won the Gateway Collegiate Athletic Conference tournament after being seeded ninth.

“I’m a little more apprehensive than the kids,” Backus said. “Any team that gets into the (tournament) had to be good to get there.”

The series will continue Saturday at 1 p.m. and if a third game is necessary, it will be played after the first game Saturday.