Storms Create Flood of Problems : Weather: Golf courses, baseball fields turned into swamps. Several events are postponed.

Having become well-acquainted with drenching rain and tenebrous clouds, coaches and sports officials throughout the region Tuesday began groping for a silver lining.

Surveying a Pierce College baseball field left under several inches of water by Monday’s storm, Coach Bob Lofrano hoped for the best.

“The only good thing about it is that this might kill all the gophers we’ve been chasing,” Lofrano said. “If it drowned them all out, I’d be pretty happy about that.”

Dick Crowell, boys’ basketball coach at San Fernando High, also looked at the bright side, despite 15 leaks in the school’s gymnasium roof.

“It’s like Niagara Falls,” said Crowell, who was forced to cancel a practice. “It’s a very extraordinary sight. Maybe we can use the big trash cans for picks and rolls.”

But at other facilities--most notably the recreational areas of the Sepulveda Basin--the damage wrought by the deluge was no laughing matter.

The cascading water that swept the basin brought with it tons of mud and debris, much of it deposited on the Encino and Balboa public golf courses and the adjacent athletic fields of Hjelte Park.

Hjelte, the crown jewel of the Valley’s municipal softball and baseball diamonds, was under more than six feet of water at one point Monday. “All you could see was the top of the backstops,” said John Pierce, a senior sports director.

The semifinal rounds of the Los Angeles city softball playoffs, scheduled to be played at Hjelte this week, are being moved to Balboa Park and will be played next week at the earliest, Pierce said.

Hjelte is considered among the city’s top sports complexes and was site of the softball competition in the 1991 Olympic Sports Festival. “Those fields might be the best in the city,” Pierce said. “It’s going to take a lot of time and work and money to bring them back.”

At nearby Encino and Balboa golf courses, six greens were completely buried with mud and will take months to repair or replace, officials at the city’s Recreation and Parks Department said.

Debris such as tree limbs covered portions of the courses, with the Encino course particularly hard hit.

There was no information on how long the courses will be closed, but Jackie Tatum, assistant general manager for the parks and recreation department said, “If we don’t get another drop it would take a week to two weeks to get Encino back in order. And even then we would only have nine holes.”

Tatum said fire hoses will be used to wash silt off the courses so the grass won’t die.

Parks and recreation officials said they could not predict how long it would take maintenance crews to work the courses into playing shape, or at what cost. “We couldn’t give a figure,” Tatum said, “because there is another storm due (Wednesday).”

Other courses have been spared--so far.

An odd sight greeted those driving past the private and posh Braemar Country Club in Tarzana at midday Tuesday, just 24 hours after more than six inches of rain had pelted that area: water sprinklers in full operation.

According to Jim Swieter, associate manager at Braemar, the rain had caused some ponds on the course to overflow, and the sprinklers were used to remove some of the water. The damage at Braemar consisted only of sand washing out of several traps.

“The water came hard, but it went right where it was designed to go,” Swieter said.

The public El Cariso Golf Club in Sylmar, just a few miles northeast of the Sepulveda Basin, received even less damage than Braemar.

“We drain real well here,” assistant manager Danny Gutmann said. “All in all, it wasn’t bad. We’d open Wednesday, if we got a little sun and some wind.”

Bill Kernen, Cal State Northridge’s baseball coach, also was hoping for a change in the weather. Some wind and sun, he said, would make the cleanup of Matador Field “a day or two job.”

As it is, “It looks like it always does after it rains,” Kernen said. “There are lakes all over the place. It’s a mess.”

Northridge’s game against Loyola Marymount, scheduled for Tuesday in Westchester, was postponed because of poor field conditions. Additionally, a game against Fullerton scheduled for today at Amerige Park in Fullerton is unlikely to be played.

The Matadors also have a three-game series against UC Irvine scheduled for this weekend. Northridge is due to play host to the Anteaters on Friday and Sunday, and travel to Irvine for a game Saturday.

Meanwhile, The Master’s College basketball team was unable to travel to Montecito near Santa Barbara for a game against Westmont on Tuesday because the 101 Freeway was closed in places because of mudslides. The game has been rescheduled for 7:30 tonight at Westmont.

Staff writer Steve Elling contributed to this story.