Baker’s Already Playing Catch-Up Ball at UC Irvine

Some would call the following list A Baker’s Dozen. I wouldn’t, but some would.

Twelve things you should know about Rod Baker, the new basketball coach at UC Irvine:

1. He played college ball at Holy Cross, which may not mean much to you now, but once upon a time . . .

“Let me throw some names at you,” Baker says. “Cousy. Heinsohn. Ronnie Perry. Joe Mullaney. We’ve had a couple of guys.”

They also had Rod Baker, who doesn’t quite make the list. “I was awful. Absolutely awful. Ask my coach. I was just good enough to hang around. But that gave me a good chance to watch. Without the onus to perform, you can watch what guys do, what should be done and what could be done.”

Baker laughs.

“We can rationalize for a lot of things in life, can’t we?”

2. He has seen UC Irvine’s 1991 nonconference schedule, which includes Pepperdine, Utah, Bradley, Colorado and Loyola Marymount, and has made one request.

“I asked (Athletic Director) Tom Ford which ones we can tear up and which ones we have to keep,” he says. “I have a great philosophy about scheduling: Get as many wins as you can.

“We’re in a situation where we need to build some confidence. We have players who have won only 16 games over the last two years. We want our players to experience what it feels like to win. They already know how to lose. They’re a pretty good group on that.”

3. He knows what it’s like to coach basketball at UC Irvine. One week on the job and he’s already playing catch-up.

“Nobody deserves to be running around like this,” he says, still trying to make up for the time lost by his late signing with Irvine. He came to terms only last Wednesday, giving him just nine days to visit potential recruits.

This past Wednesday, he was in Los Angeles, scouting the spring league at Fremont High. Thursday, it was back to Oakland to double-check on a prospect, “just to make sure it wasn’t a mirage.” Today, it’s a flight to Connecticut to ring on a few contacts he developed over the years while headhunting for Seton Hall and P.J. Carlesimo.

“Right now,” he says, “I’m trying to squeeze two months into two weeks.”

4. He knows what Irvine needs for next season and it’s not spelled F-O-R-W-A-R-D.

“We must have about 200 wing players,” he says. “We’ve got 200 guys who want to go on the wing and maybe three guys to go in the post. So, I guess we’re going to do some things on the wing this year.”

5. He would like to find someone who can rebound and score and defend in the middle. He knows he will have to take a number.

“You never have enough post guys,” he says. “We have the same trouble here as we had at Seton Hall, where we were scrambling all year for guys who could play the post. Of course, at Seton Hall, trying to find them was a little easier.”

6. If worst comes to worst, he would settle for one new face--someone young, someone who could run the offense.

“In a certain sense, we don’t have to do anything. We don’t have to sign anyone. I’m perfectly content with the players we have already, but I would like to get one high school senior point guard. I want one guy I can teach to play the way I want to play. I want to get him early, because I demand so much of a point guard.”

7. He claims to be content with the current Irvine roster because he thinks the current Irvine roster, 1990-91 evidence to the contrary, can play defense.

“I think Craig Marshall can play defense,” he says. “Gerald McDonald. I think you can get Jeff Von Lutzow to play defense. You just have to sell them on the idea. . . .

“Last season, they were four wins away from .500. Four wins. And there were at least four games they could have won by playing better team defense. All I had to do was look at the final stats. The other team shot 50% against them. You can’t win playing like that. You won’t find many teams with winning records that let the other guy score 50% of the time.”

8. He has this theory about playing defense: It comes to those who weight-train.

“You want to put physical pressure on the other team’s offense,” Baker says, “and last year, our guys weren’t strong enough to do that on the Division I level. So, starting (Friday) at 2 p.m., our strength program begins.

“What you have to do is get the guys to buy into it. That’s why they put mirrors in the weight room. Every guy likes to see himself get bigger, see his body improve.”

9. He would have liked a second chance to coach Marco Lokar, the Seton Hall player who was bullied into quitting the team and returning to his home in Italy because he refused to wear an American flag on his jersey last season.

“I think we screwed that up as basketball coaches,” Baker says. “We said, ‘We’re thinking about wearing the American flag; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. What we should have said was, ‘We may or may not wear the American flag, but whatever we decide, it’s going to be all of us or none of us.’

“Marco Lokar is a pacifist in the truest sense of the word and a strong-willed person. He was not concerned about the (controversy) as it pertained to him. He was concerned about how it affected him family. His wife was pregnant at the time and she didn’t want the aggravation.

“It was a shame . . . I thought that’s what we were over their fighting for--that we still have a choice. I was really disappointed in our fans. He had the right to make his own choice, too. It’s not the one you wanted, so you’re going to jump on him?”

10. When watching films of the Anteaters, Baker says he was “torn back and forth between wanting to know and not wanting to know. You know what I mean?”

In other words, “It might be a good thing if some of the guys got a fresh start. It doesn’t matter how they’ve been pigeonholed before.

“It’s like graduating from high school and going away to college. Say you were a nerd in high school. You go to a new college, where no one knows you, and you can be a great guy. Or if you screwed up in high school, you get this second chance to settle down.

“I’d like to try the same thing with our players. ‘Take a shot. Be a real good player and a real good person. Be whatever you want to be.’ ”

11. He is planning to make one more demand of his players every home game: Bring a buddy.

“If we’re going to get people to come to the games, we’re going to have to go door-to-door,” Baker says. “I’m telling the guys to bring their friends. Everybody likes to play in front of their friends. And once they come, I think we’ll be solid enough to get them to come back. I don’t think they’ll be saying, ‘Damn, we got cheated, we wasted our time tonight.’ ”

12. One last thing P.J. Carlesimo taught Baker during their four years together at Seton Hall:

“I will never play him.”