Starting Over at UC Irvine : Basketball: After an embarrassing finish last year, the men’s team is eager to make amends.

The players have run and run, and the coach has worked harder than ever before in 35 years of coaching, he says.

But the weight of a terrible season can never be shed until another season takes its place, and that is why Bill Mulligan needs this one to begin.

“It’s the first time I ever finished a season and wanted to start back a week later,” said Mulligan whose UC Irvine team went 5-23 last year, setting a school record with 15 losses in a row and finishing with the worst record in the school’s history.

Some of the players felt the same.

“Once the season ended and we were 0-0 again, I looked forward to starting again,” said forward Jeff Herdman.

Mulligan didn’t even particularly want a break.

“Usually you want to take time off, but we want to get in and go so we can redeem ourselves,” Mulligan said.

The urge to go took a different form in some of his players.

Ricky Butler, the Anteaters’ 6-foot-7 senior center and top player, considered transferring. So did Dylan Rigdon, the freshman who hit seven of seven three-pointers in a victory over Cal State Fullerton last season.

“I’m happy I stayed. I want to play, and we’ve brought in some good players,” Rigdon said. He had several meetings with Mulligan, who was trying to be sure the future of his program didn’t walk away.

After last season, Mulligan, 60, was given a one-year contract extension, through the end of the 1991-92 season. It was a way of easing the pressure of this season, but it is no long-term commitment, even though Mulligan was conference coach of the year five seasons ago, when the Anteaters beat Nevada Las Vegas twice.

Rigdon stayed, as did the other two freshmen--Jeff Von Lutzow and Craig Marshall--who keyed a late-season surge in which the Anteaters won three of their final six games.

While Rigdon was deciding, Butler says he also was weighing his options.

“I decided to stick around in the spring, when (Mulligan) told me what he thought I could do this year,” said Butler, who has lost 25 pounds since last season. “I tried to get in the best shape possible to have a chance to play after college.”

But for a while it was touch and go.

“What are you going to do, Dylan?” Butler would ask.

“I don’t know, what are you going to do?” Rigdon said. “It would help me decide if I knew what you were doing.”

But here they are, back to try to improve the record that threatens to diminish Mulligan’s reputation as a proven winner in the later years of his career.

“We’re going to do it for him,” Butler said.

There is little doubt that Irvine will be better--new players such as guards Gerald McDonald and David Hollaway and forward Cornelius Banks seem to ensure that. But with a schedule that begins Friday against UCLA in the Great Alaska Shootout in Anchorage, and includes games against Maryland, Stanford and California, it is not certain how much the record will reflect the improvement.

Butler, Rigdon, Von Lutzow and Herdman will begin the season as returning starters.

The most crucial player to the team’s success, though, is probably point guard McDonald, who will handle the reins of the fast break, the run-and-Mulligan style this team is committed to for the entire season.

In the Anteaters’ first exhibition game, McDonald jumped center against a 6-9 player--and won.

Mulligan and the Anteaters can only hope he can deliver such feats all season.

A closer look at the team:

GUARD

McDonald, a Compton College transfer, is capable of injecting speed into an Irvine fast break that at times has been more broken than fast. “He’s a jet,” Butler said. He replaces the only lost starter, Rod Palmer. The pace of Irvine’s games will mean McDonald will commit turnovers, but he has had more than Mulligan would like in preseason exhibition games.

Rigdon is the off guard, and has the most defined role on the team: Keep shooting. He made 41% of his shots last season and 27 of 65 three-pointers.

David Hollaway, a transfer from West L.A. College, gives the team another man capable of playing the point or shooting guard, and Marshall, who started 15 games last season, can play guard or forward.

FORWARD

Herdman, the only senior other than Butler, lost his touch last year, making only 38% of his shots and falling out of the starting five. The previous year, he had been one of the nation’s leaders in three-point percentage.

“I didn’t change anything last year,” Herdman said. “It wasn’t a matter of my shot, just my concentration level.”

Von Lutzow, by contrast, shot 56% as a freshman last season. This season, he replaced Marshall, a swingman, in the starting lineup between the first and second exhibition games.

Other players in the mix at forward, the team’s deepest position, include Banks, juniors Don May and Elgin Rogers, former El Toro High player Khari Johnson and freshman Gabe Higa.

CENTER

Butler is prepared to be the player he was predicted to be out of Ocean View High School. The weight loss makes him better suited to the running game, and more confident, he says.

“He is a big-time player,” Mulligan said.

Johnson can also play behind Butler, and freshmen Rick Swanwick, who redshirted last season, and Dan Augilis will be backups at the position as well.

Butler is out to prove himself and improve the team’s record.

“Twenty-three losses,” Butler said. “Wow.”