With Coach in Overdrive, SDSU Program Gets Up to Speed : Basketball: Beth Burns’ pace is fast, and so is the progress of her 13-7 Aztecs.

Beth Burns talks like she coaches, coaches like she recruits and recruits like she lives.

Rapidly.

“C’mon Chris,” Burns implored at a recent practice. “We run! We run, Chris!”

The game clock is always winding down, and yet there is always so much more to do. Recruit. Parent. Coax. Plead. Praise. X. O.

You’re all working, but nobody’s talking!” Burns suddenly shouts at practice. “We’ve got to talk.”

Since arriving as the women’s basketball coach at San Diego State three years ago, Burns has taken the team from 7-23 (1989-90) to 14-14 (1990-91) to 13-7 (this season). The Aztecs, tied for first a week ago, are now tied for second in the Western Athletic Conference at 5-2 after defeating Utah but losing to Brigham Young last week.

Burns’ progress at SDSU has been evident, consistent, yet there is always today, and more to accomplish, and not much time to reflect on the beginnings.

“Too slow!” Burns yells to the team. “Too slow!”

The Aztecs run , which tells you quite a bit about Burns’ soul. So does her recruiting success. Her last two recruiting classes at SDSU have been ranked as high as 11th and ninth, respectively, in the nation.

She talks, prods, pesters, confides and tempts.

But most of all, she believes.

Her tempo has been up since she begged her way onto Tara VanDerveer’s staff at Ohio State after graduating from Ohio Wesleyan in 1979. Took three days, but she finally made it.

It started with a few phone calls, but Burns couldn’t get an appointment to see VanDerveer. So, since Ohio State was only about 25 miles from where Burns lived, she figured it wouldn’t hurt to make the drive . . .

“I think they were so amazed that they told me if Tara came out (of her office), I could see her,” Burns said.

But the minutes turned to hours, and the hours soon drained away. Dejected, Burns went home . . . and drove back the next day.

“Every time Tara went to the restroom or to get a drink of water, she had to pass me,” Burns said.

Trouble was, as Burns was sitting there, she soon realized she had a course syllabus in hand instead of her resume. So she drove all the way home, all the way back . . . and Day No. 2 ended without Burns getting an audience with VanDerveer.

So she drove back a third time and, finally, VanDerveer walked out of her office, saw Burns and said, “Do you want to speak with me?”

Said Burns: “I’ll never forget sitting in her office. I looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘I’ll do anything. Blow up the balls, towel the floor, observe practice, watch, learn . . . “

This was in the spring. VanDerveer invited Burns to help at a summer camp and then hired Burns as a volunteer assistant coach.

She stayed there a season before catching on as an assistant at East Carolina (1981-83), Colorado (1983-88) and North Carolina State (1988-89).

By the time she arrived at SDSU in 1989-90 for her first head coaching job, word was out that this woman could recruit a hen into a fox-house.

“I almost hate the word,” Burns said. “When you say ‘recruiting’ it conjures up images of a used-car salesman in some people’s minds.

“Recruiting is communicating and recruiting is sincerity. . . . I always feel that if we do the best job, even if we don’t get them, we never lose. Because you never know when you’ll be back in that area, or when the player has a sister.”

Said VanDerveer: “The bottom line is, she totally outworks people. She’s extremely motivated and takes a lot of pride in what she does. So she does it right.

“Whether breaking down film or recruiting, she can go, go, go. I don’t know how long she can keep up the pace.”

Only circumstances seem to slow her down. Once, Burns pulled into a recruit’s driveway, hopped out of the car and started toward the house. She didn’t get very far, though, because she noticed the car was rolling.

She had forgotten to put it in park.

Then there was the time that Burns, a strict vegetarian, sat down to dinner with a recruit and her family in Oregon. Burns, then coaching at Colorado, was served a sandwich with meat in it. Attempting to remain polite, she slipped the meat part of the sandwich into her jacket pocket.

“The dog started going crazy,” VanDerveer said. “He was trying to tear her jacket apart. The parents kept saying, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with the dog.’

“They ended up signing the player.”

Burns has called herself the “Eddie Haskell of recruiting,” because she gets to know the recruit’s parents so well. She works whomever is in her path . . . brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, significant others. No doubt she would work the recruit’s dog, if dogs could talk.

“She’s extremely energetic and terribly thorough,” said Michelle Miles, a senior guard who is this year’s SDSU captain. “But not just in coaching. She’s that way in every facet of her life. She’s a very charismatic person.”

Miles was recruited by Burns at Colorado, decided to attend UCLA and then, after two years, transferred to SDSU when Burns arrived.

“When I was looking to transfer, it was important to me to get in a program in which the priorities were straight,” Miles said. “I knew they would be with Coach Burns.

“Plus, I knew she could put together a conference championship team in my time.”

Thorough? Burns got to know twins Falisha and Lakeysha Wright of New Jersey when they were freshmen in high school. Both are now in their freshmen seasons at SDSU. Falisha is the Aztecs’ starting point guard and was a member of the 1991 U.S. Olympic Festival East team.

“I really had a feel for Coach Burns,” Falisha Wright said. “By talking to her on the phone, I really got to know her. Other coaches put their assistants on the phone to do their dirty work.”

Burns is not one to mass mail 450 photo-copied letters to potential recruits. She would rather mail 45 hand-written letters. She recruits as much to heart and guts as to quickness and ballhandling.

And once she puts a team together, she continues to get after her players. She uses corny sayings as motivational tools. One of her favorites, one that is pasted on the back of the nameplate on her desk, is “The meek may inherit the earth, but they won’t get the ball.”

She will sing, if that’s what it takes. Two years ago, before the Aztecs traveled to Santa Barbara for a game, she promised the team she would sing a song on the bus ride home if the Aztecs won. SDSU hit a shot with two seconds left to win the game. Burns sang.

The team gathers at her house for a meal the night before home games. Burns said she simply takes it out of the players’ per diem meal money so that nothing is illegal.

“It’s a bonding thing,” Burns said. “It’s fun. Sometimes we watch tapes, a lot of times we watch ESPN . . .

“I love the game of basketball because it is a team (game). How many times have you seen team chemistry win games? That is the thing that wins games and to me, it’s the most pleasurable.”

She has always wanted to be a basketball coach, partly, she thinks, because she said she never had a good coach while she was growing up.

“And in college, I wanted to be with people who were as obsessive as me,” she said. “The success I’ve had is because I have a work ethic. I was always going to be the best coach I can be. I want to make a difference in people’s lives--I like working with people. I want to win a national championship. I’ll strive every day of my life to do it.”

She was in position at North Carolina State. The year before she left for SDSU, the Wolfpack was a top 10 team and advanced to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA women’s tournament.

Jayne Hancock, SDSU’s senior women’s administrator, got permission to speak with Burns after that season.

“I said, ‘Sure, I’ll listen,’ but I was in a position where I could be extremely choosy,” Burns said.

She had two big questions before she was going to accept any head coaching job: Does the school give a coach what she needs to recruit? And, does the administration really want to win, or would it be happy with a .500 team?

“You only get one chance at coaching, I think,” Burns said. “If I fail by virtue of my inability, I can live with it. But if I fail because my deck is stacked, I don’t know if I’d get another opportunity.

“Once I flew out here and walked around, I said, ‘This could be a gold mine.’ ”

Not immediately. Her first team, the one that went 7-23, was more of a statement than a question mark.

“The biggest thing I wanted to teach them in the first year was how to be,” Burns said. “How to tuck their shirts in. How to travel to an away game. How to prepare to win.

“We didn’t win a lot, but I like to think we prepared how to win.”

It was a totally new situation to Burns. She had no secretary, so the coaches were responsible for everything. Travel plans, academic counseling, meal money . . . but Burns, as usual, hit the ground running.

“I do a lot here I didn’t do in other places, but that’s OK,” she said. “I don’t know if I’d want to work for me sometimes. I’m very demanding. I have an incredibly high energy level. I have a pace, I think, that’s hard to keep up with.”

But last season, something happened that nobody could have expected. Burns--by her own admission--got soft. Oh, there was a big reason--injuries depleted her roster so that, at one point, she only had six available players. The Aztecs lost four in a row to close the season, and Burns blames herself for part of that.

“We should have won 17 last year,” she said. “Coulda, shoulda, woulda. We were down to six kids and I got soft. We shot a lot of free throws (during practice). I preserved them for game days. I didn’t instill the mental toughness.”

So she tried to fix that this season. Before the season started, she took the team to Pine Valley and made them run more than any other team she has coached. They responded. And as this season progresses, she periodically refers to that day. Remember it? Well then, suck it up. You made it through that, you can make it through a lousy second half.

“This team is going to run,” Burns said. “We will not shift it to a two-three zone and walk-it-up mode. We’re going to run and run and run. That’s how we’re going to be successful.”

She will run. She will recruit. She will zero in on her job, her lifetime ambition, her single-minded dream.

And she will dance. She might even eat meat.

“They swear I said that if we win the championship, I’d eat a steak,” Burns said. “They say it’s the WAC championship; I say the national championship. But I told them I’d dance if we win the WAC championship.

“Hey. Whatever works.”