CAL STATE FULLERTON NOTEBOOK : Garman Restocks the Softball Team With Freshman Standouts

Two freshmen will line the heart of her batting order. Two other freshmen will start in the infield. One of her top two pitchers is a freshman, and so is her top utility player.

Is Cal State Fullerton softball Coach Judi Garman concerned?

Not a bit.

“If there’s anyone who had a better freshman recruiting class than we did . . . ,” Garman said, pausing for the right words.

She’d like to see it?

“I don’t want to see it. Our freshmen are as good as any seasoned players there are, and I look for them to have a real impact this season.”

So do a lot of other coaches. Despite their youth, the Titans, who open the 1992 season at the 12-team Arizona tournament Thursday, are ranked fifth in the NCAA preseason poll and were picked to finish second behind Fresno State in the Big West Conference.

Among Fullerton’s top freshmen are left-handed pitcher Cheryl Longeway, the former Kennedy High School standout who will split time with Tiffany Boyd; catcher Shannon Dolan, who is a Fountain Valley graduate; third baseman Marci White, second baseman Traci Fischer, and utility player Rose Garces.

Dolan will likely bat third and Garces will hit fourth or fifth. White and Fischer will start in the infield, and Dolan will see plenty of action behind the plate.

Longeway and White played for the Southern California Raiders, who beat the Orange County Batbusters in last summer’s American Softball Assn. 18-and-under national championship game. Dolan and Garces played for the Batbusters.

“They’re young, but a lot of them have really had great competitive experience,” Garman said. “Both the Raiders and Batbusters played about 12 tournament games to get to the ASA final.”

Another newcomer, junior shortstop Denise DeWalt, is expected to have a major impact. The transfer from Cederville College in Ohio is one of the team’s fastest players and will lead off.

Rounding out the lineup will be returning starters Kelly Hunt (.242 average, 20 RBIs in 1991) at first base, Melissa Hadfield (.297) in left field, Jennifer Shuey (.273) in right field and K.C. Clark (.206) in center. Catcher Kim Powers (.253, 19 RBIs) returns, but her playing time might be limited because of arm problems.

The pitching staff has more quality than depth. Junior Tiffany Boyd, who has apparently recovered fully from off-season knee surgery, again will be the ace. The hard-throwing Boyd went 33-8 with a 0.68 earned-run average and a conference-leading 246 strikeouts last season.

Longeway, who keeps batters off balance with a variety of off-speed pitches and went 83-15 in four years at Kennedy, will be the No. 2 starter, and senior Ann Van Dortrecht, who went 17-4 with a 1.00 ERA last season, will be No. 3. Van Dortrecht, however, injured her shoulder in January and won’t be ready until the end of March.

“Three pitchers is all you need if they’re healthy,” Garman said. “But having two really strong pitchers is what most coaches dream about.”

Rapid Return: Leon Wood, a Titan part-time assistant basketball coach until last week, passed a series of physicals and was activated by the Rapid City Thrillers of the Continental Basketball Assn. over the weekend.

An All-American at Fullerton in 1984, Wood led the Thrillers in scoring last season before announcing his retirement after foot surgery in May. But after a seven-month layoff and successful rehabilitation, the 29-year-old guard decided to attempt a comeback.

Wood wasn’t planning to return to action until March and had given a German team an oral commitment to join it for the final weeks of the European season. But the Thrillers, down to 10 players because of injuries, called Wood last week.

Wood spent several days undergoing tests in Rapid City and joined the team Saturday in Rockford, Ill. He played about six minutes each in games against the Rockford Lightning Saturday and the Quad-Cities (Iowa) Thunder Sunday, and was en route Monday to Albany, N.Y., for a game tonight.

“After he learns the sets and gets familiar with the players, everything will be fine,” said Chico Averbuck, Rapid City’s player personnel manager. “I think he’ll be a great addition to the team.”

Scholar-Athletes: Claudette Jackson, a senior forward on the women’s basketball team, and Michael Grubbs, a junior 118-pound wrestler, have been selected as Fullerton’s Big West scholar-athletes. They will be honored at a March 12 luncheon at the Long Beach Sheraton.

Jackson leads the team and the conference in scoring with a 20.1 average and also averages 9.4 rebounds. She has a 3.38 grade-point average in physical education.

Grubbs is a two-time NCAA qualifier who has a 13-5 record this season. The business administration major has a 3.77 GPA and has made the Dean’s List all five semesters.

One That Got Away: The Titan football team lost what could have been its best defensive recruit when Scott Moala, an All-American linebacker from Chabot College in Hayward, signed with Utah State last week.

Moala, a 6-foot-2, 240-pounder who had given Fullerton coaches an oral commitment, had 15 sacks last season and was a first-team, all-state pick by California community college coaches. But he informed Titan coaches Wednesday, the first day players could sign letters of intent, that he had changed his mind.

Titan Notes

Dante Powell, the heralded freshman outfielder from Long Beach Millikan High School, has had a rough start with the Cal State Fullerton baseball team, going one for 11 in the first four games. And after picking up his only hit, a single against Stanford in the first game of Sunday’s doubleheader, Powell got picked off of first. Meanwhile, D.C. Olsen, a less-heralded freshman from Fullerton High, has game-winning hits in both Titan victories--his pinch-hit, two-run single in the sixth inning gave Fullerton a 5-3 lead over Stanford in Saturday’s 8-3 victory, and his sixth-inning RBI single gave the Titans a 2-1 lead in Sunday’s 3-1 victory over the Cardinal. . . . The baseball team (2-2) fell from fifth to seventh in Collegiate Baseball’s poll and rose from 15th to 11th in Baseball America’s poll Monday. The Titans play Cal State Northridge at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday at Amerige Park and will play host to 20th-ranked Minnesota in a three-game series beginning Friday night. . . . The wrestling team, which has been on the road for nine consecutive matches, returns home for dual matches against Brigham Young Saturday and Wyoming Sunday. Both begin at 1 p.m. . . . The women’s gymnastics team will play host to UCLA in a dual meet Friday at 7:30 p.m.