UC IRVINE NOTEBOOK : Goalkeeper Gartlan Hopes Luck Has Finally Changed
Mike Gartlan turned his right knee to the side and traced the faint scars with his fingers.
“That’s how I got these babies,” he said. “It was Feb. 8, 1988. I went up for a layup, and planted my leg and got hit on the side.”
A few minutes later, Gartlan raised his left arm, and fingered the two deep-pink welts, souvenirs of a 1989 injury.
“It was Friday the 13th,” he said, and laughed. “I shouldn’t have played that day.”
Gartlan was a sophomore when he injured his knee. He was the starting goalkeeper on UC Irvine’s soccer team, and had been named first-team all-conference after the fall season.
Ahead of him, perhaps, were two more all-conference seasons.
He was playing intramural basketball in the Bren Center when he got hit and felt his knee pop.
“At first I thought it was a chipped bone,” Gartlan said. “When they told me that, I was optimistic. But I kind of knew it was more than that because I felt the whole thing pop.”
It was much more than that. It was the anterior cruciate ligament, also known as the ACL. Call it A for agony: Every athlete knows an injury to that ligament is disastrous.
For Gartlan, it meant three surgeries and pins in his knees, one of which remains. It also meant a year out of soccer--a year of tedious rehabilitation.
Gartlan sat out the ’88 season, but stayed close to the team, attending every practice, every game. He came back ready for ’89.
He played the first 11 games, but felt uneasy.
“The whole first half of the season, I wasn’t really into it,” Gartlan said. “I wasn’t feeling comfortable in goal. The 12th game, then I was really starting to feel good.”
The era of good feeling didn’t last.
“There were maybe eight minutes left in the game,” Gartlan said. “I just went out on a play outside the box, and I just fell on my way out and snapped both bones in my arm.”
The bones didn’t break the skin, but Gartlan required surgery on the ulna and the radius.
“With that, I have, like, three plates and 15 surgical screws,” he said.
Gartlan, the Irvine athlete most likely to set off alarms going through airport security, is back in uniform this year for his final season. He would like to get through it with only good breaks--none of them, preferably, in his bones.
Gartlan appeared to be in fine form in Irvine’s season opener last week, with a school-record 14-save performance in a 3-1 loss to UCLA.
The loss to the highly regarded Bruins was encouraging to Irvine. A year ago, during a 3-15-1 season, they were beaten by UCLA, 7-0.
Gartlan is back to try to boost that record and reclaim his position among the Big West Conference’s best goalkeepers.
One who surpassed him in his absence was Fresno State’s Mark Dougherty, who was second-team all-conference to Gartlan in 1987 and first team the past two years. Dougherty is now playing professionally and Gartlan hopes to do the same.
But he returns, he says, a more patient man.
“I just don’t really get too upset,” he said.
Even when he had to sit out of his club team’s practices and games an additional five weeks after reinjuring his arm when he came back after the surgery.
With the Anteaters, he will try to improve on last year’s disastrous record.
Damon Ellis, who filled in for Gartlan during the redshirt year and the final part of last season, is out of a job this season. But Ellis will redshirt during Gartlan’s fifth year, and return with two years of eligibility next year.
Gartlan says he likes the Anteaters’ prospects, partly because of what he called a more positive attitude on the team, coached by Derek Lawther.
“I’ve learned not to make predictions,” Gartlan said. “Last year I thought we’d be great and it didn’t work out.
“This year, I think, barring injuries, we should do all right.”
Barring injuries--Gartlan can only wait and hope.
More soccer: The first injury of the season came quickly, when captain Erik Kirsch hurt his knee against UCLA. He will be out about three weeks.
Steve Florentine, first a basketball player at Irvine and later a volleyball standout, has been selected for the U.S. national team’s B squad.
Florentine, a beach volleyball player who adapted his skills to the indoor game, made the second-tier national team, which is designed to develop players for the 1996 Olympics.
Steve Odgers, a former Irvine decathlete, has been in a lot of races. But a pennant race?
Odgers is in his first season as strength and conditioning coach with the Chicago White Sox, the only team anywhere near the Oakland Athletics in the American League West.
Odgers, 28, was assistant director of conditioning for the White Sox’s organization in 1988-89, and was hired to join the major league club when Tim Wilson left to become strength coach at Nevada Las Vegas.
Odgers, who earned a BA in social ecology from Irvine in 1985, was the sixth-ranked U.S. decathlete in 1989 and finished 11th at the U.S. Olympic Trials in 1988.
Anteater Notes
The defending national champion Irvine water polo team will play in a scrimmage tournament at Cal State Long Beach at 8:30 a.m. Saturday at the Long Beach campus pool. Pablo Yrizar led the Anteaters with 53 goals last season. Irvine was 27-6 and defeated California, 9-8, in the NCAA title game. The Anteaters open the regular season Sept. 14-16 in the annual UCI Water Polo Tournament at the Corona del Mar High School pool. The top nine teams in the nation in last season’s final poll will compete. . . . The women’s volleyball team, 18-14 overall last season, plays Oklahoma in its home opener Saturday at Crawford Hall. The team was 1-3 in the Sun Devil Labor Day Challenge at Tempe, Ariz., last weekend, where Kim Collins, formerly of Tustin High School, made the all-tournament team. Two freshmen have emerged as standouts: Traci Webb, formerly of University High, and Vesna Sepic, who has moved into the starting lineup at right outside hitter. . . . The women’s soccer team, which finished with a 5-11-4 record last season, lost to UC Santa Barbara, 3-0, in its season opener and plays UC Davis and Chico State on the road this week. The team is coached by Ray Smith, who is beginning his first season.