COLLEGE DIVISION NOTEBOOK / MARTIN BECK : New-Look Chapman Starts With the Finnish

It will be a significantly changed Chapman College men’s basketball team that takes to the floor Saturday night against the Finnish national team, and Coach Bob Boyd hopes the exhibition will answer some questions.

The Panthers will probably open with three players who started last year, but Boyd is counting on newcomers to shore up a lineup that finished in a tie with Cal Poly Pomona for last place in the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. last season.

Two transfers--Al Jackson, a point guard who last played three seasons ago for West Valley College in Northern California, and Zlatko Josic, a 6-foot-5, 230-pound forward who played in five games for Clemson last season--will also start, Boyd said.

Boyd is hoping Josic and Alan Schlines, a 6-6 forward from Orange Coast College, will help returning starters Rog Middleton and Franz Reyes, the Panthers’ only true inside players last year.

Jackson is expected to free Chris Martin and Andre Hill, both of whom spent time at point guard last season. Chuck McGavran, a transfer who played at Newport Harbor, Orange Coast and Cal State Northridge, also is likely to play at guard.

Boyd says he knows little about the Finnish team, which plays two games in Arizona this week before meeting Chapman at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and UC Irvine on Monday.

“I think this is quite an early start for our team,” Boyd said. “I’d be more comfortable if we weren’t going to start for another week.

“(But) I think that this game will give us a much clearer picture as to where we are as a team,” Boyd said. “We’ll probably say after this game that we really need to work on our half-court offense against a set defense.”

Down again: Chapman dropped four places to 15th in the latest NCAA Division II women’s volleyball rankings after losing to U.S. International last week. Chapman might have damaged its playoff hopes by losing to Cal State Los Angeles in four games Tuesday and dropping to fourth place in the CCAA.

“It was like we were playing in a haze all match,” Chapman Coach Mary Cahill said. “It was very frustrating.”

With two matches remaining--at home against Cal State Dominguez Hills on Friday and at No. 2 Cal State Bakersfield on Tuesday--the Panthers almost certainly will finish fourth. Last season’s fourth-place team, Bakersfield, qualified for the playoffs and won the national championship. But the conference was weakened when Cal State Northridge left to move up to Division I, and its image was further tarnished at the Air Force tournament last weekend.

Other than Bakersfield, which lost in the finals to top-rated West Texas State, conference teams showed poorly at the tournament, and it was reflected in the NCAA rankings released Wednesday. UC Riverside, which lost half its matches at the tournament, dropped from sixth to 12th, and Cal Poly Pomona, which finished 23rd out of 24 teams, dropped from 11th to 19th.

But Chapman’s loss to Cal State Los Angeles, which had won only one conference match, was more damaging. For Chapman to finish third and capture an automatic berth in the regional playoffs, Pomona would have to lose its final three matches, and the Panthers would have to win twice.

“We hurt ourselves,” Cahill said.

After opening with an 86-66 victory over LIFE Bible College Monday, the Pacific Christian men’s basketball team will try to continue its dominance over Western Christian Athletic Conference teams in the conference’s preseason tournament. Pacific Christian, which hasn’t lost in 30 Western Christian games over three seasons, will play International Baptist of Tempe, Ariz., at 4:45 p.m. today.

Pacific Christian lost four of its six top players from the team that advanced to the finals of the National Christian College Athletic Assn. before losing.

College Division Notes

Miriam Paulus, a 6-foot-2 middle blocker for Christ College Irvine, has been named second-team All-District 3 in volleyball. Paulus, a senior from Redlands High School, had 275 kills and 100 solo blocks and led the district with a .462 attack percentage. . . . Christ College also had two players named second-team all-district in soccer: Aaron Clasen, a junior forward who scored nine goals and led the district in shots (69) and Mike Fleischli, a junior defender from Orange Lutheran High School.