Home Court Is Where Trakh’s Heart Is : Girls’ basketball: Brea-Olinda coach has had offers to work on the college level but none has been just right.

For the past 10 years, Mark Trakh has overseen the formation of a girls’ basketball dynasty at Brea-Olinda High School. With each Orange League championship--eight in all--and Southern Section championship--three--Trakh and his Lady Cats have climbed higher and higher.

They won the county’s first girls’ basketball state championship two seasons ago. Last season, Brea-Olinda attained its highest national ranking, fourth, and returned to the state final with a county-record 55-game winning streak before losing the title game to Auburn Placer.

Because of this success, it has been hard for Trakh to leave the high school ranks and move on to college coaching.

In April 1989, he turned down an offer to coach the girls’ team at Chapman College. San Diego State asked Trakh to apply for an assistant’s job this spring, but he never pursued it. “I’d like to move on, but the situation has to be a good one,” said Trakh, 35.

“I’m not a coward,” he said. “I take risks, but I take well-thought-out, calculated risks. We’re going to win here for the next seven years. I can’t give that up that easily. I have a lot of kids who have made a commitment here. I’m in no rush, just because it’s a college position, to give this up to go to the wrong position.”

In fact, Trakh has it better than many college coaches. While many high school coaches share a desk with three or more other coaches in a caged-in area off the locker room, Trakh has his own spacious office--complete with a VCR, television and other audio-visual equipment. His door opens into the high school’s new 2,000-seat gymnasium where the Lady Cats draw an average of 900 spectators, more than many local Division I and II women’s programs draw.

In Brea, the high school is the only show in town. Trakh has a 256-32 record and has received declarations of commendation from the county, the state legislature, the city, the board of education and Nancy Reagan. He is respected by the community and among his peers. It’s a role he’s very comfortable with.

“I didn’t take the Chapman job because I couldn’t cut the ties,” said Trakh, whose license plates read BREA BB. “I knew I had a really good team coming back, and I went with my heart, not with my head. I really felt that I wanted to coach Aimee (McDaniel) and Tammy (Blackburn) during their senior year in high school.

“In retrospect, it was the move for me to take the Chapman position, but I didn’t have retrospect at that time, I didn’t have hindsight.”

Other Orange County high school coaches have made the transition to college.

Mickey McAulay, 30, was the last county coach to beat Trakh, in February, 1987. McAulay, who helped build a successful girls’ basketball program at Katella, recently completed her first season at the University of Redlands, a Division III school. Previously, she spent two seasons as an assistant at Cal Poly Pomona after four years at Katella. She was 60-33 at Katella and led the Knights to the Southern Section 3-A final in 1987, her last season.

McAulay agonized about leaving Katella. But then, she had a talk with Fullerton College Coach Colleen Riley, whom McAulay had assisted for two seasons.

“I was struggling with the decision,” McAulay said. “I didn’t want to leave the kids coming up and she said, ‘You know what Mickey, every year there are going to be more kids, and in four years they’re going to be gone. Are they worried about leaving you in four years?’ The point being, you have to look to your own needs.

“If you can look in the mirror and say I want a bigger challenge, put all the rest behind you and go for it. If it is meant to be, it will happen. I would tell Mark (that) you can’t look back. You have to go full steam ahead and make the best of it.”

Trakh seems to have trouble getting up a head of steam about leaving Brea-Olinda.

He has applied for coaching positions at the University of Hawaii more than once, and applied at UC Santa Barbara in 1986. Hawaii told him he didn’t have enough experience. The school was looking for a former college assistant rather than a high school head coach. UC Santa Barbara sent him a form letter of rejection and didn’t interview him.

There is a trend among college athletic directors looking for head coaches to hire women who have been assistants at the college level, which could make it more difficult for Trakh. This trend is recognized by Mike Thornton and Anastacio (Nash) Rivera, former high school girls’ basketball coaches in the county who have moved up to the collegiate ranks.

After eight years and a 152-92 record with the Marina girls, Thornton, 42, moved to Orange Coast College. Last season, his first OCC team was 26-6 and finished second in the Orange Empire League.

Thornton realizes, however, that moving to a four-year school would be a lot tougher.

“I think it’s really difficult for a man to get a head coaching job at the four-year level,” Thornton said. “Ten to 15 years ago, it was an advantage being male. But now you have many, many more qualified women coming out of college who have been involved in athletic systems for a long time and there is a lot of opportunity for them right now. I think all things being equal, a woman is going to get the job and rightfully so because it has been the other way around for so long.”

After 21 years of coaching high school basketball, Nash Rivera became an assistant at a four-year college five years ago at the age of 50. But he never went job-hunting. UCLA women’s coach Billie Moore, at whose camps he had worked for years, recruited him.

Nash was one of Orange County’s most respected coaches after guiding El Dorado’s boys to Southern Section 2-A titles in 1974 and ’75. He coached girls for the next three seasons, winning the league championship once and qualifying for playoffs all three years. Then he moved to Chaffey Community College as an assistant men’s coach for one year and finally to UCLA.

His history with Moore helped negate his age and his gender as factors in getting the job, two things Trakh may have to contend with, he said.

“There are a lot of good female assistants out there,” Rivera said. “Division I (athletic directors) are taking either former head or assistant coaches from good collegiate programs. The female head coaches are developing assistants. They are doing what Bobby Knight and Dean Smith have done. They are developing good assistants and looking out for them trying to get them jobs.

“Mark has a lot of time, but I think he is going to be competing with a lot of young coaches for these positions and the people who hire and fire are going to think about that. They are going to ask, ‘How long is it going to take him to establish a program like he has at Brea?’ ”

McAulay said there are more men than women coaching women at the collegiate level. She said the number of women applying for positions is decreasing.

But last week, Kentucky Coach Rick Pitino threw another twist into the coaching shuffle. He hired Bernadette Locke as a men’s assistant coach.

“I think you have a better chance if you’re a qualified woman,” Trakh said. “I’m not so sure that isn’t proper. But now you have Pitino hiring a woman. So I guess we’re going in the direction where the most qualified person should coach the team. I think it should be the most qualified person for that position.”

Trakh has more credentials, in terms of his records, than Thornton, McAulay, Rivera or Deborah Woelke, who was successful as Trakh’s Orange League rival at Valencia before becoming an assistant at UC Riverside this season.

Trakh is halfway through completing a master’s program in physical education at an Azusa Pacific satellite campus.

But does he want to move on?

He says he does, even though he’s rooted firmly in Brea’s soil.

‘See, next year is a challenge,” he said. “Everyone is saying (all-state guards) McDaniel and Blackburn have graduated. (The program is) dead in the water. If I left after this year people would say, ‘Hey, he jumped ship.’ But if I stay, and try to build another winner . . . There has to be a certain degree of loyalty.”

Apparently 10 years is not enough.

“I think I’ve proven that I can coach on the high school level,” Trakh said. “Someday I’m going to see, just for my own curiosity, if I can coach on the next level, see if I can recruit. See if I can ‘X and O’ with those people. I think I can. It’s just a question of getting hired and hired in the right program.

“Chapman, I would have taken it in retrospect. It’s still not the right situation. They didn’t have enough scholarships to offer and there’s no way you can compete with Pomona. I’m not going to take a position where it’s not possible to win big. I can’t go where the best I can do is second place. I have to be in a situation where I can be competitive with the top people in that conference or whatever. In other words, if a school can only offer five scholarships, it is going to be very hard for me to be competitive against schools that are offering eight scholarships.”

So Trakh grapples with the decision, the same one that faced Pat Riley, John Thompson at Georgetown and McAulay when she was at Katella. When is it time to move on?

Said McAulay, “It was a really tough decision for me leaving Katella. I had to go with my head over my heart. A move like that, you have to take a chance . . . When I took the job at Katella, I took it on intuition. I knew it would be the right job. When I interviewed at Redlands, I had that same gut feeling.”

It’s the same feeling Trakh will have. At least for one more season.