Team Is Giving SDSU Its Money’s Worth : Volleyball: Tight budgets once sent the program into hibernation. Now the Aztecs are ranked third in the nation.

1973 . . .

About the only thing longer than sideburns at San Diego State are the lines forming outside Peterson Gym for men’s volleyball matches.

The queue begins at the entrance and stretches nearly three blocks to Montezuma Road.

And the show is worth the wait. The Aztecs roll through the season and end up winning the only NCAA championship in school history with a victory over Cal State Long Beach at the San Diego Sports Arena.

1984 . . .

SDSU men’s volleyball is cut from the athletic department payroll. Coach Mark Warner and former Coach Duncan McFarland are given a month to come up with the $40,000 necessary to operate the program.

After 30 days of furious fund-raising, Warner and McFarland present a $40,000 check to the athletic department.

Volleyball survives.

But top recruits, some who eventually will play for the U.S. National Team, turn SDSU down because of the uncertainty surrounding scholarships.

1991 . . .

The uniforms are new. The days of playing on worn-out shoes are past. And the Aztecs, back in the athletic department’s budget since 1987, once again are near the top of collegiate volleyball, ranked third in the nation.

OK, so there aren’t lines all the way to Montezuma. Those days, says Jack Henn, coach of the 1973 championship team who is now co-coach with Warner, are probably gone forever.

“I don’t know that we can really get back to that again,” Henn said. “I don’t know if the students are that avid anymore. . . . (In 1973) it was just part of the lifestyle. The beach, and the long hair. It was part of that culture.”

Now the hair is shorter. And so are the lines. But the enthusiasm has been rekindled. The Aztecs are 13-3, 7-2 in the Western Intercollegiate Volleyball Assn. They have lost twice to second-ranked Cal State Long Beach and once to top-ranked USC. That’s it.

In some respects, this is a patchwork team, constructed of great athletes who only recently became great volleyball players.

The top high school volleyball players usually go to UCLA. Or USC. SDSU gets the guys who played football and basketball and water polo. They’re guys who weren’t quite good enough in their high school sports to go on and play at the college level. So they decided to go with volleyball.

Given his druthers, Eric Etebari, a senior outside hitter, would have played football in college. That was his first love.

“Volleyball,” he said, “was the last thing on my mind.”

Yet after graduating from Santa Monica High School, he found his football options limited to community colleges. And since SDSU wanted him as a volleyball player, he figured it was worth a shot.

He had played one year of high school volleyball.

That’s not unusual for this team. Mike Mattarocci, a senior middle blocker, went to Bonita Vista High School, which didn’t even have a volleyball team when he was there. He was a basketball player, who picked up a few skills playing volleyball on the beach.

“Half the guys on the team had really little or almost no high school experience,” Mattarocci said. “They had to learn in college.”

And so the Aztecs took their lumps.

Said Mattarocci: “We got stomped in the early years.”

Other times, they were competitive. Just not competitive enough to win.

“We never really got over the hump,” Warner said. “We’d be close . . . Now we seem to be doing things that we used to watch the other teams do against us.”

When the preseason rankings came out, the Aztecs were nowhere to be found. They were mentioned only in the “Best of the Rests.”

That didn’t sit well with the players. After all, they’d finished ninth in the country the previous season and returned all their key players.

But really, they had no reason to gripe. And Henn told them so.

“I said: “Fellas, what have we done? We haven’t done anything,” he said. “So let them go ahead and think it. All we’ve got to is beat everybody.”

And, save for Long Beach and USC, they have done just that. Among their list of victims are fifth-ranked Penn State, sixth-ranked UCLA, seventh-ranked Pepperdine and ninth-ranked Stanford. All were ranked ahead of them at the beginning of the season.

Led by four senior starters--Etebari, Mattarocci, outside hitter Mike Schlegel and setter Tagore Evans--the Aztecs have won seven matches in a row and are rolling toward a second chance at USC next Thursday in Los Angeles.

Henn and Warner both noticed that the Aztecs were jittery for the first meeting Feb. 1 with the Trojans at Peterson Gym, where USC won in three games.

Nearly two months later, SDSU players are more confident about trading kills with the defending national champions.

“I honestly feel we could upset USC and Long Beach,” Etebari said. “I would say we’re physically the strongest volleyball team in college right now.”

Mike Schlegel figured this might be SDSU’s best team in a long time. That’s why he took a sabbatical last year and played on the professional beach tour before returning for his final year of eligibility this season.

“I had a strong feeling that we weren’t going to be good last year,” Schlegel said. “I didn’t want to go through four years of being on a losing volleyball team. . . . I’m really glad I took a year off.”

For Schlegel, this season is truly a testimony to the progression the program has made the past five years.

“We used to play in our practice gear, almost,” he said. “It was pretty bad. Now it’s great. We’re reaping the benefits. We have a couple of different uniforms and we can get some shoes when ours wear out.”

And improved equipment can do wonders for morale. It helps players take a little more pride in what they’re doing on the court.

“As we get better, it just snowballs,” Mattarocci said. “You get all the newest equipment. You get more money into the program. Guys start becoming more confident because they feel better. So they start playing better. I think that’s really important.”

Whether this means SDSU is on the verge of joining USC and UCLA among college volleyball’s elite remains to be seen. When push comes to shove, there is still a hierarchy. Top high school players still lean toward schools with tradition.

“The best players are going to want to go to the best schools,” Mattarocci said. “And until San Diego State makes it to the final four a couple of years in a row, or wins a national championship, they’re not going to command the number one, two, three recruits.

“San Diego State does not get a whole lot of recognition for its athletics. And maybe deservedly so. But after this year, when guys see SDSU in the final four and they’re considering schools to go play volleyball at, they will not only see the nice weather and the nice city. They’ll see: ‘Man, those guys are also a final-four team.’ ”