OCC’s Giant-Killer Crew Takes On Big Boys in National Championships : Rowing: Coach Dave Grant continues community college’s tradition of competing with top universities.

The boathouse at Orange Coast College is no place for underachievers.

Although the school is part of a community college system designed to help students prepare for a four-year university, its junior varsity crew is more than ready to take on those big-name universities.

“We call ourselves the giant killers because we beat the big schools and we do it as sophomores,” said Kyle Enger, a member of OCC’s top crew team.

At the Pacific Coast rowing championships this month, OCC defeated California, UCLA and Washington in the junior varsity competition to qualify for the Intercollegiate Rowing Assn. Championships, which start today in Syracuse, N.Y.

OCC’s top team, all sophomores, had not only the fastest junior varsity time of the day at the championships, but it had the third-fastest time of the day. Only the varsity teams from Washington and UCLA had faster times than OCC’s 6 minutes 4 seconds for 2,000 meters.

Orange Coast’s time was eight seconds better than Cal’s varsity and nine seconds better than Stanford’s.

“I was talking to the Olympic coach and he was in hysterics about that,” said Orange Coast Coach Dave Grant.

Today in Syracuse, the Orange Coast crew--Enger, Ed Turner, Jeff Lundwall, Tom Mitchell, Ramsey Madsen, Sean Nicholson, Charlie Stewart, Jon Kern and coxswain Steve Morris--will be challenging more rowing giants. Last year, the freshman eight, which competed with largely the same team as this year’s top crew, finished second in the nation to Princeton.

Today, Orange Coast will race against crews from Brown, Navy, Cal and Northeastern, with the winner advancing to the final on Saturday. The others will compete in another heat Friday, from which two teams will qualify for the final.

Orange Coast is the only two-year school to compete in the IRA championship. The only national title Orange Coast has won came in 1980 in the freshman eight event.

“It’s a hard thing to win,” Grant said. “(But) it’s kind of like Gertrude Stein said, ‘If something can be done, why do it?’ ”

Grant, who this month was named president of the college after an interim year in the position, was hired by the school as a history professor in 1962. When he took over the crew program in 1963, it was hardly a program.

“We existed in a couple of Quonset huts with one light bulb and one water spigot,” Grant said. “We had a dock of telephone poles and that was the extent of it.”

But from its location between Newport Harbor and Pacific Coast Highway, the crew made a rapid rise under Grant. OCC went to the national championships for the first time in 1968--the junior varsity eight finished second--and in 1971 became the first crew from California in decades to race at the Henley Royal Regatta in England. In 1985, Orange Coast became the first crew from the United States to compete in the People’s Republic of China.

Now, thanks to donations from locals the college has one of the best equipped facilities in the nation. In 1970, OCC built a better boathouse, which has since been expanded twice, the second time after a $500,000 fund-raising campaign.

Without private donations, the college couldn’t afford state-of-the-art racing shells. One type of shell costs about $18,000.

“It’s a great luxury for a college to own one of those--Harvard owns one--we own three,” Grant recently told a high school senior who is considering rowing at OCC next year.

Such support gives Orange Coast’s crew an advantage, but Grant, who is also an assistant coach for the U.S. Olympic crew team, and freshman coach Jim Jorgensen have only two years to do what most coaches do in four.

“We only have two years to do this thing so it makes it important to stay very focused,” Grant said.