Getting Picture at UC Santa Barbara : Women’s basketball: It has been pay-back time for the Gauchos, who will take a 23-4 record into the Big West tournament.

Interior decoration was the problem in UC Santa Barbara’s locker room, Barbara Ehardt insisted.

Ehardt, the Gauchos’ assistant coach, solved it in January, on the eve of their first game this season against Cal State Long Beach. She put up a handful of pictures--all familiar, but not friendly, faces of the 49er players and coaches.

To her players, long sufferers at the hands of the 49ers, it was like walking in and finding their worst enemy sitting in the living room.

“I tend to come up with different methods of motivation,” Ehardt said. “That was the motivational challenge--I told them those pictures were staying there the rest of the season if they lost to Long Beach.”

There was a large special guest picture. It was of former Cal State Long Beach Coach Joan Bonvicini, now at Arizona. The Gaucho players particularly disliked her, feeling that she had run up the score against them several times.

“Joan’s was the biggest,” said Ehardt, adding that she respects Bonvicini as a coach.

“The pictures of the seniors were bigger (than those of other players). Even though we like (Coach) Glenn (McDonald), his picture had to be up there, too.”

Santa Barbara beat the 49ers, 84-77, for the first time in the 27 games they had played.

“After the game, we ripped (the pictures) all down,” junior point guard Cori Close said.

Presumably, Bonvicini failed to escape the shredders, right?

“No, there was a spit wad thrown at it afterward,” said Close, laughing.

If all this sounds a little extreme, consider this:

--1989-90: Long Beach 101, Santa Barbara 77.

--1988-89: Long Beach 94, Santa Barbara 62.

--1987-88: Long Beach 91, Santa Barbara 64.

--1986-87: Long Beach 105, Santa Barbara 25.

During that last game, the Gauchos were trailing, 40-0, before they managed to sink a couple of free throws. And Bonvicini earned her current status on campus by refusing to call off the pressing defense, even during the second half.

The Gauchos (23-4) are headed into today’s Big West Conference tournament with a regular-season championship. Kirk Reynolds, their assistant director of media relations, was the public address announcer at the Long Beach game.

It serves as a frame of reference when he talks about the old days, when the Gauchos went 6-22 and 4-22 in consecutive seasons before Coach Mark French arrived for the 1987-88 season.

“It was bad,” Reynolds says. “How bad? Like 105-25.”

The Gauchos needed help fast. Stan Morrison, then the athletic director, called French, who had been a colleague at University of the Pacific. French had revived programs at Pacific and Idaho State.

Pacific went from 6-19 to a 20-game winner by French’s second season in Stockton. At Idaho State, he inherited a 3-22 program and went 10-15 by his fourth and final season.

But recruiting is easier at Santa Barbara than it was in Stockton and Pocatello.

“(At) Idaho State, it was unbelievably hard to even get a visit with the top-flight kids,” said French, who played basketball and baseball for the Gauchos in the early ‘70s.

“Same thing at UOP. It was really eye-opening how much weight the beach and the UC system carries out here. It was so nice to pick up the phone and they’d say, ‘Oh, UCSB, I’ve been to your campus.’

“I thought at that point it was going to be up to us. This is an awfully easy place to recruit. The only thing we haven’t had in the past was a winning tradition, but we’re . . . establishing one now.”

The rebuilding program made the transition to a winning program last season, when the Gauchos went 17-12, their first winning record since 1981-82. And Santa Barbara took the next step this season by winning at UCLA, Long Beach, Fresno State, Cal State Fullerton, UNLV and Hawaii for the first time in the program’s history. The Gauchos beat Hawaii when the Wahines were ranked No. 12 in the country.

The Gauchos settled some old scores, but they haven’t been able to make the Associated Press women’s top 25. After the Hawaii victory, they slipped from 29th to 36th. And after clinching the Big West championship with a 16-2 record, the Gauchos dropped several spots to 31st in this week’s poll. Meanwhile, Hawaii is No. 21.

“I wish I could say I was so mentally tough that it didn’t bother me--but it does,” Close said.

“For us, we’d like to see some national respect. But if we listened to outside factors, we wouldn’t be here today. Nobody thought we could do this.”

French doesn’t think exclusion is an entirely bad thing.

“It’s harder to deal with when they feel deeply they’re better than those people,” he said. “On the other hand, when they get that tone in their voice, I kind of like that. ‘OK, well, let’s go box out.’ I think it has been helpful to us up at this point.

“We’ve come a long way in a short period of time.”

Senior forward Barbara Beainy, who is the scoring leader with a 15.7-point average, remembers her first couple of seasons. Beainy worried that she wouldn’t realize her potential and disliked the Gauchos’ slow-down style.

After her sophomore season, Beainy prepared to transfer to the University of San Francisco. But she missed her friends and heard that Lisa Crosskey, a transfer from Fullerton Junior College, was going to help change the style to an up-tempo pace. So Beainy returned to Santa Barbara.

And what is it like now, to play before crowds of 1,000?

“Instead of four people?” she asked, joking. “I never realized what a great thing a crowd was because I forgot what it was like to play in front of so many people.

“In high school, I played my last two games in front of crowds of 2,000. When I came here, we’d be lucky if our coaches would show up.”