UC IRVINE NOTEBOOK : Infielder Shifts Focus From Books to Ball

Jon Damush hit .387 for UC Irvine during his sophomore season, but when the mechanical engineering major saw the class schedule for the next year, he was dismayed.

“Everything I needed was all afternoons, 1 to 3 Monday and Wednesday or something,” Damush said. “I wouldn’t have been able to make many practices or games.”

Damush, an infielder, made a rare choice. He became an academic redshirt, sitting out a baseball season so he could concentrate on finishing some of the toughest--and most disadvantageously scheduled--classes in his demanding major.

He is back this season, and starting at shortstop as a junior.

While his Irvine teammates played baseball last season, Damush played a lot of volleyball and did a lot of weightlifting. None of that could keep his baseball skills as sharp as they were.

“You get rusty,” he said. “But it’s kind of like riding a bike. Besides, I’m from back East, and you kind of adapt to there being a few months of the year when you can’t play at all during the winter.”

His fielding reflexes, he said, never left him. The readjustment at the plate was more difficult, but Damush thinks he has found his batting eye again.

“It’s just picking up the ball out of the pitcher’s hand, getting your stride straight, being able to take the ball the opposite way,” he said.

Damush took his year off with the blessing of Coach Mike Gerakos, who remembered Damush when he was recruiting because Damush had been a New Jersey high school science-fair winner.

“He built his own wind tunnel or something,” Gerakos said.

Now Gerakos just remembers that promising sophomore season.

“He had that golden wand,” Gerakos said. “I hope he still has it.”

News that Cal State Fullerton has dropped women’s volleyball and men’s gymnastics might have sent a shiver through Irvine’s athletic department, which underwent substantial budget cuts and serious scares last year.

Irvine Athletic Director Tom Ford is still awaiting information on how much funding the department will receive from student registration fees, but for now, the situation doesn’t appear as dire as last year.

“There are still some unknowns, but hopefully we won’t have to cut sports,” he said.

The immediate concern is achieving a balanced budget in this fiscal year, as mandated by the university. If Irvine can achieve its spring fund-raising goal of $300,000, Ford expects to meet that mandate. Otherwise, budgets might be frozen. Irvine raised about $240,000 last year.

“I’ve got coaches crying, ‘We don’t have any money,’ ” Ford said. “It’s hard for people who have been in the system a long time to understand that we can’t continue to spend and go over budgets.”

Not-So-Ugly Stat of Week: Irvine’s 3-14 men’s basketball team--a poor-shooting team most of the season--has shot 55% in its past two games. That’s 15% above the team’s season average before the Anteaters shot a season-high 61% in a loss to Cal State Long Beach Thursday and 49% in a loss to UC Santa Barbara Saturday. The season low is 29%, against Nevada Las Vegas Jan. 4.

The Anteaters are not suddenly better shooters, they’re just taking more shots they can make.

“We’re taking better shots, running the offense better,” Coach Rod Baker said. “We’re scoring inside, and that means the defense has to be more concerned with the inside. Now the shots you get outside aren’t 19 feet any more, they might be 17.”

When Kathy Lizarraga, then the leading scorer on the women’s basketball team, was lost for the season because of a knee injury, it was bad enough.

Yvonne Catala, then the team’s second-leading scorer, suffered a lower back strain. She has missed four games, and counting.

Add to that the brief return of Christina Adams, a freshman who had quit the team because of back trouble during the fall. Adams, a state scoring champion in high school, tried to rejoin the team to add guard depth, but quickly found the pain too much and quit again.

Coach Colleen Matsuhara, in her first season at Irvine, can’t help but be a little exasperated.

“Anybody know a good acupuncturist? We’d be willing to try one,” she said.

Catala might be out another seven to 10 days, but Matsuhara has her dress for games anyway.

“We’ve only got eight players. If we get in foul trouble, I tell her she might just have to go inside and stand there.”

Even though her team is 4-13 and winless in Big West games, Matsuhara has gotten good performances lately from sophomore guard Karie Yoshioka and freshman forward Jinelle Williams.

Yoshioka is now the leading scorer, averaging 13 points a game. She has replaced Lizarraga as a three-point threat, making 12 of 23 attempts, and had a career-high 22 points against Hawaii.

Williams, a freshman from Brea-Olinda High School, has also stepped up her play. She scored a career-high 21 points--all in the second half--against Fresno State.

Anteater Notes

Liz Koch, a sophomore swimmer, set a school record in the 200-yard backstroke Saturday. Her time of 2 minutes 11.55 seconds was good for third place in a dual-meet loss to Cal State Northridge. It was the second time this season the record has been broken. Freshman Laurel Hooper broke it in November with a time of 2:12.11. . . . Vince O’Boyle, UC Irvine’s director of track and field and cross-country, has been named to the NCAA track and field committee. He will serve a term of three years on the committee, which conducts NCAA championships and sets qualifying standards, among other duties.