As a Sub, Strickland Is Super : Basketball: Toreros’ top shooter may not be a starter, but he is completing his senior season with a flourish.

The last time Wayman Strickland exited the Sports Center floor at the University of San Diego, not quite two weeks ago, he had just fouled out and given Loyola Marymount star Terrell Lowery a chance to shoot free throws with only seconds left in overtime. Loyola eventually won in double overtime.

As Strickland walked along the bench looking for a seat, a bewildered USD Coach Hank Egan followed him, asking repeatedly, “Wayman, why? Why? Why? Why?”

Last Saturday in Portland, USD finally broke its seven-game losing streak, beating the Pilots, 79-76, behind a 27-point barrage by Strickland, who made 11 of 12 shots, including two three-point attempts.

They’re the lasting vignettes of the senior guard’s four-year college career, a four-year pastiche of the good, the bad and the ugly that has seen him drive opponents and his coach crazy, in about equal doses.

An attempt to describe their relationship elicits a grin from Egan, who has shouted the same epithet so often at Strickland during games that courtside observers could be forgiven for thinking his name is “WAYMAN ---DAMMIT.”

“I don’t know how to define” their relationship, Egan said. “He doesn’t always go by the book--he’s one to strike out on his own. Sometimes that’s good; sometimes in a team concept that’s not so good. I like Wayman, but there’s some things he does to frustrate me.”

Egan adds the rejoinder, “I think I yell at everybody indiscriminately” during games, and Strickland says it doesn’t bother him much. “We actually get along pretty well,” Strickland said with a sly smile.

“The only thing people outside the team see is when he’s coaching, he yanks me to the side and yells. I take into account what he’s saying, not how he’s saying it. That’s his style. He’s a very vocal coach. When he gets upset, he lets you know. He gets on you, it’s over with, you go out and play. I’ve had coaches that were maybe a little worse than that.

“My personality, that stuff doesn’t bother me at all.”

However, they have butted heads once or twice. “Interesting, yeah, that would describe our relationship,” Strickland says. “It’s been interesting.”

Strickland has been an intriguing player from the moment he arrived at Alcala Park 3 1/2 years ago, fresh off honors as the San Francisco city player of the year at Riordan High, ready to take the first open shot and say whatever came to mind.

He has toned down a bit since. “He’s matured some, yes,” Egan said.

Gylan Dottin, a four-year teammate of Strickland, said, “Everybody gets yelled at and we all go off on tangents, but he may have a tendency to go off on more tangents, so he gets yelled at more. Wayman’s a real good pickup player. Sometimes he lets his pickup skills get in the way of our structure and he gets yelled at.”

A starter most of the time since midway through his freshman season, the 6-foot-2 guard last weekend became the 12th player in USD history to score 1,000 career points. The team’s most reliable perimeter shooter, he goes into tonight’s game against the University of San Francisco ranked second in the West Coast Conference in three-point accuracy (40 for 88, 45.5%), averaging 11 points a game.

Having bounced between point guard and shooting guard, Strickland also has 407 career assists, the school’s most prolific total since it upgraded to Division I in 1979 and near Stan Washington’s overall school record of 451.

Still, Strickland’s senior season has been a curious one, marked by a sudden switch from a starting position to a sixth-man role in December and some noticeably long stretches on the bench when Egan was unhappy with his choice of shots. He has started 13 of the Toreros’ 25 games.

Egan has maintained throughout the season that the lineup change was no demotion, but merely an attempt to shake things up. Strickland is fourth on the team in minutes played, and and performances have run the gamut from his scoring outburst in Portland and similarly prolific games in the Sports Center against Portland (18 points in 26 minutes) and Santa Clara (19 points in 28 minutes) to lackluster efforts in which he appeared hesitant to shoot. He was scoreless while shooting 0-for-4 at Colorado and took only three shots against Cal State Northridge despite making all three.

It’s not been the way he visualized his senior year, he acknowledged. Coming out of the starting lineup hurt, even if it didn’t materially affect his playing time.

“The decision was made not because Wayman’s doing anything wrong, but for the good of the team,” Egan said. “While I felt for him, that’s the way it has to be.”

Strickland said, “I’ve been through a lot of changes. It has most definitely not been what I envisioned--I’d been starting for three years, all of a sudden I’m not starting. It’s one of those things you have to deal with. I can’t worry about that ‘cause I’m not the coach.”

Searching for the right words, Strickland, who will graduate in the summer with a degree in communications, said, “I don’t know. . . . I can’t say it didn’t have an effect, it’s just one of those things where your confidence goes down, you go in the game and try to do something (as a reserve), you make a mistake and it plays with your confidence.

“You have to put all that out of your mind, you have to stay aggressive the whole game. I just have to be a man about it. There’s nothing I can do about it . . . except play basketball. The coach is gonna do what he feels is in the best interest of the team. I think he knows what he’s doing.”

Still, it’s enough to make Strickland a little wistful, though he’s mature enough now not to deal in what-ifs. “In high school I knew Terrell (Lowery); we were pretty good friends. Maybe I might’ve had some success in (Loyola Marymount’s) system, maybe if I could take 30 shots a game like (USC’s) Harold Miner I might’ve been scoring my 2,000th point last weekend,” he said.

“But I’m happy with what I chose. You can’t live your life like that--what I woulda done, what I coulda done--or you’ll be miserable. Right now I’m not even worried about what I’ve done personally. I haven’t really dwelt on what I’ve done--maybe when the season’s over. I’m strictly looking forward to the next game.”

Throughout his career, the benchmark of Strickland’s play has been his visible emotion. “I don’t play laid-back,” he said. “When I’m playing best, I play all-out, all over the court. I’m very emotional, I really get into the game. It shows when I’m playing well.”

Even when Strickland has trouble reining in his emotions and gets out of control enough to irritate Egan, the coach said, “Wayman’s a competitor. I like the way he competes.”

Strickland has had good luck against certain teams but in an offense where nobody is featured, he is expected to look for his shot at the right time. “When we don’t run our offense well everybody suffers,” he said. “I shoot really well when I take good shots. I’ve proven that over the year. I have lots of confidence. I know I can shoot the ball. In our offense it’s a matter of taking good shots. In our offense I’m not gonna get the chance to come down and just shoot it, like some teams. I get my points here and there.”

So he was surprised when Portland ran a zone defense specifically to bottle him up last weekend. Maybe he shouldn’t have been, having averaged 24 points against the Pilots the past two seasons.

“It’s not like I’m a big-time scorer,” Strickland said. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a box-and-one since high school. Coach Jack (assistant Coach Jack Avina) was joking that’s the first time he’s seen somebody go diamond-and-one on a sub.”

If Strickland downplays his personal accomplishments, he gets animated talking about the makeup of his team and the possibility of a trip to the NCAA tournament. USD last reached postseason play in 1987.

USD’s only shot at the NCAAs is to win next weekend’s WCC tournament, the winner of which gets the WCC’s automatic NCAA berth.

“The goal of every college Division I player is to go to the NCAA tournament,” Strickland said. “I don’t think there’s anybody out there playing competitive NCAA basketball who hasn’t dreamed of playing in the tournament.”

Despite the Toreros’ recent seven-game losing streak and their 12-13 record, Strickland said they are capable of winning the WCC Tournament: “Every team has limitations. Any team can be beaten, as we’ve seen in college ball the last couple weeks. This is not the NBA, where you know Miami has no chance playing the Chicago Bulls. There are a lot of different variables you have to take into account.