WOMEN’S BASKETBALL / ROAD TO THE FINAL FOUR : Virginia’s Ryan Still Recalls Early Years

From the outside, it looks as if Debbie Ryan effortlessly turned the Virginia women’s basketball team into a national power.

Let’s pause now for Ryan’s laughter.

Five consecutive Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season titles, two consecutive appearances in the Final Four and large, supportive home crowds haven’t erased Ryan’s memories of the agonizingly slow climb toward those accomplishments.

In the mid-1980s, Ryan almost felt trapped. She was all but ready to pass the chalk talk to someone else.

“I was very disappointed, unhappy and didn’t think it was going to ever happen here,” said Ryan, who is in her 15th season. “I was tired. There’s no personal life with this job. It’s a good 80 hours a week, and it was just wearing on me. I wasn’t feeling good about it.”

Her teams were getting better--ever so slowly--each year. But the Cavaliers didn’t advance past the NCAA’s first round until the 1986-87 season, when Ryan also was named ACC coach of the year. The next season, Donna Holt became the team’s first All-American.

And the rest is history.

Still, Ryan wants to give credit to one person, the man who helped her survive that mid-career crisis. That praise is reserved for NCAA Executive Director Dick Schultz, then Virginia athletic director.

Schultz listened as Ryan requested a transfer into sports administration. He urged patience.

“He said, ‘I’m not going to let you out right now,’ ” Ryan said.

Schultz had a good perspective because he had been a coach for 20 years. He told Ryan that administrative work also had its drawbacks.

Said Ryan: “He told me, ‘You have the chance to do something that nobody else has done. You’ve got to stay in this because there aren’t that many out there that are like you.’ ”

End of discussion.

“I was young and impressionable,” Ryan said. “He had been in it 20 years, and he said his first few years in administration were a nightmare. He probably knew me better than I knew myself.”

Desperate Measures Dept.: Washington has been steadily dropping in the Associated Press top 25 poll. The Huskies, once as high as No. 9, are No. 23 this week.

The Huskies lost one-sided, back-to-back games to Stanford and California last weekend. Those losses caused Washington Coach Chris Gobrecht to close practices to reporters and prohibit player interviews until after Thursday night’s game against USC.

It has been a season of firsts for UC Santa Barbara. The Gauchos, 19-4 overall and 12-2 in the Big West Conference, recorded their first victory against Cal State Long Beach in late January and defeated UCLA, 78-70, earlier in the season at Pauley Pavilion.

They would like one more first: A top 25 ranking.

The Gauchos have lost to three teams--Arizona State, Baylor and Pacific--that are not ranked in the top 25. But the first two losses were in the first four games of the season.

This week, the Gauchos were hurt by the timing of their victory over Hawaii on Sunday night in Honolulu. On Friday, Hawaii beat Santa Barbara in overtime, but the AP voting was done before Sunday’s game.

Hawaii, which had been 13th, moved up one spot. The Gauchos, meanwhile, went from 29th to 36th.