He Towers Over His Opponents : Tennis: Meet UC Irvine’s Brett Stern, a 5-foot-5 freshman who has had the hot hand lately as the Anteaters’ No. 5 singles player.

Even the most successful junior players can be a bit intimidated when they start playing tennis with the Division I big boys as freshmen in college. So you figure UC Irvine’s Brett Stern--who at 5 feet 5 and 130 pounds might be the last guy picked for a junior high pickup basketball game--couldn’t help but look up to his opponents.

But Stern knows he has a chance to beat anybody, and it’s a confidence he developed by beating little girls.

Well, actually one little girl named Jennifer Capriati. For two years (1988 and ‘89) at the Rick Macci Tennis Academy in Grenelefe, Fla., Brett and Jennifer lived and trained together. They smashed ground strokes at each other almost every day. They also played a number of matches.

“She won once,” Brett said, smiling. “I can get to everything she can hit, and when she tries to take advantage of the angles and comes to the net, she’s pretty easy to pass.”

Don’t tell that to Monica Seles.

If you had seen Capriati play and then watched Stern, you’d understand that those “friendly matches” were played with the intensity of a Wimbledon final.

“It was a very competitive atmosphere,” Stern said. “Jennifer is really full of fight. Even the little training games Rick would devise turned into the biggest battles, everyone wanted to win so badly.”

For Stern, his will to win as a junior has evolved into a stubborn determination not to lose in college.

Stern, who plays No. 5 singles for the Anteaters, has won seven consecutive matches and nine of his past 10. During the seven-match streak, he has survived match point once, lost the first set and been down a break in the second twice, and gone the three-set distance four times.

He can be pushed to the precipice, but he just won’t go over. He calls it “grinding them out.” Irvine Coach Greg Patton says he’s “the Indiana Jones of tennis.”

“He seems to be at his best when you’ve got a gun to his head,” Patton said. “It’s like they’ve knocked him out, they’ve dug the hole, they’re ready to throw the dirt on him, and he slips away. Then, the next thing you know, it’s the gravedigger who’s in the grave.

“He’s a fighting machine down to the last fiber. It exhausts me just to watch him.”

Not surprisingly, the scrambling freshman has become a favorite of Anteater fans, a couple hundred of whom gave him a standing ovation recently after he rallied for a three-set victory against Fresno State’s Steve Jackson.

“He was down a set and a break in the second before coming back,” Patton said. “Then, 10 minutes after his match, he walked up into the stands, and I’ve only seen ovations like that after some of our seniors’ final matches at home.”

His teammates are equally impressed. And they’ve shown him the kind of respect any freshman who lays his guts on the line for the good of the team deserves.

They ridicule him unmercifully.

When they have a team meal at a restaurant on the road, someone will pull up a high chair for Stern. When Patton’s wife Christa brought their infant daughter out to the courts, one Anteater said, “Hey Brett, here’s a girl small enough for you to go out with.”

Patton is tempted to say enough is enough, but Stern just keeps smiling, and if the joke is any good, he laughs along.

“It really doesn’t bother me at all and my height has never bothered me,” he said. “I don’t even think about it. I never get mad when they make fun of my height because I’m happy with my height.”

Stern’s graduation to Division I tennis has not been all dramatic victories and good times, though. He switched from a two-handed backhand to a one-handed stroke just before leaving Florida for Irvine and then lost five of his first seven matches.

“He struggled at the start of the year when he changed his backhand because he lost some confidence,” Patton said. “But he’s got the work ethic to make that kind of change. And he realized for his game to improve, he had to change. He has no reach at all. It takes him two steps where it takes another guy one.

“I mean the guy was an incredible ball machine, but at this level, you can’t just be a ball machine, you’ve got to be a penetrating machine. You can’t just get everything back, you’ve got to penetrate with it.”

Macci and Stern had been discussing the switch for years, but every time Stern considered it, he always “chickened out.” When he left Florida, however, he was determined to hit one-handed backhands.

After a couple of months in Irvine, he started again to wish he had chickened out.

“My first quarter here was my biggest nightmare in tennis,” Stern said. “I wasn’t hitting too many backhands in the court. I had a lot of doubts, and I was really down in the dumps. But we had worked on my two-handed backhand for years, and I just couldn’t consistently hit the ball deep. It was a stiff stroke, and Rick told me my one-handed stroke was much freer.

“So I went home at (winter) break and kept working on it, and now I really feel I made the right decision. It’s almost better than my forehand.”

It’s easy for Stern to work on his tennis at home. His parents built a house in Miami with a tennis court in the backyard. That’s where he first started working on his ground strokes at age 6.

Then he spent four years away from home, living at a tennis academy where they practiced four hours every weekday and six hours daily on the weekends. And now he’s on the other coast, working to build a foundation to the next step, the pro tour.

Stern says he chose Irvine because he wanted to attend a school with a top 10 tennis program and a coach who could help him achieve his dream of playing professionally.

“I must have talked to 100 people who know Coach Patton, and 99 said he was great, and the other one didn’t have anything bad to say,” Stern said. “When I came out here to visit, I really liked the school. But mainly it was Coach Patton.”

Patton would never say he thinks Stern is too small to make it as a pro. Right now, of course, Stern makes Michael Chang look like a defensive lineman, but Indiana Jones never came out on top because he was big and strong.

“His size has turned out to be his strength,” Patton said. “He’s the most dedicated young man I’ve ever coached. He works harder than the hardest workers.

“The kid’s just a giant in my eyes.”