PREP BASKETBALL STATE CHAMPIONSHIP GAMES : Trakh Seeks Equal Job Opportunity

Where do you go once you’ve turned an after-school afterthought into a veritable athletic and socio-cultural revolution?

What do you do once you’ve put high school girls’ basketball on the front page of major metropolitan newspapers and unofficially renamed the city of Brea “Ladycat Country”?

After going 324-40 in 12 years, laying annual claim to the State Division III final since 1989 and turning the idea of pony-tailed point guards into a civic obsession, what’s left, what’s next?

Sometimes, Mark Trakh sits in his office beneath the west basket in the Brea-Olinda High School gymnasium and asks himself these kinds of questions.

Occasionally, he has stepped outside to see if there are any answers.

Too often, he has been shown the door back inside.

Let the most successful coach in the history of Orange County girls’ basketball dream a little and, five years from now, he’d like to see himself “coaching on the college level, Division I, to be at a Division I school with a good academic program and a good athletic program. That would probably be the ultimate in my profession.”

Last year, Trakh looked into some openings. Wanted: Head women’s basketball coach at UC Irvine. Wanted: Head women’s basketball coach at Cal State Los Angeles. Wanting one or the other, Trakh inquired within.

At UC Irvine, the perennial bottom line of Big West women’s basketball, he couldn’t even get an interview.

At Cal State Los Angeles, Trakh got at least that. And more than that--he was told that he and former Muir High girls’ Coach Mel Sims were the preferred candidates of the school’s search committee. Thanks for the input, the athletic director said . . . and she gave the job to an interim coach named Marcia Murota.

“It’s funny,” Trakh says, although apparently not funny enough to laugh about, “but what’s happening now is a movement, a push for women to coach women on that level. Which I think is proper. I don’t have a problem with that.

“I do have a problem when there’s an opening at Cal State LA and the two finalists are qualified men and they don’t give it to either one.”

A sign of the times, Trakh says. Just like the panel discussion he saw on TV during last year’s Final Four, where it was noted that men hold 52% of all head coaching jobs in Division I women’s basketball. “And someone says, ‘We gotta reverse that trend,’ ” Trakh recalls. “This was a direct quote: ‘We’ve got to stop the men from taking over.’

“To me, that’s like, ‘Wait a minute, you’re talking about us.’ Suppose you’d just switch words and say ‘We’ve got to stop any minority from taking over.’

“The men (coaches) talk about it a lot. We just don’t think it’s fair or equitable.”

Reverse discrimination--a popular theme at this point in our history, especially on the Republican campaign trail. Trakh is no Pat Buchanan--and be thankful, Ladycats, for small favors--but he is a firm believer that coaches ought to be rated on Xs and Os, not X and Y chromosomes.

“We didn’t do this because we couldn’t coach boys,” Trakh says. “We chose to make this our livelihood. Now, all of a sudden, we’re getting the door shut in our faces and they’re saying, ‘Thank you for what you’ve done and we’ll take your players and thanks for upgrading the programs because girls’ basketball has made a big jump, but now you’re not going to have the opportunity to move up in your profession.’

“I tell my kids, ‘Don’t let the fact that you’re female stop you from doing anything,’ and yet, we have a lot of men’s coaches who are subjected to the same prejudice and bias that we’re teaching our kids to overcome.”

The stacked deck is in the eye of the beholder. In Trakh’s case, one trump card could be his reputation. By his own admission, Trakh was “a real jerk” during his early years at Brea, which he attests to immaturity, an unhealthy infatuation with the sideline technique of Bob Knight (“He was my idol, probably my No. 1 mistake”) and the “growing pains” that come with building a program from nothing and then coping with overnight success.

“I was crazy,” he said. “I’d yell and scream, throw water bottles. You should’ve seen me. I don’t know how I wasn’t fired.”

He wasn’t because he won--and had players willing to withstand the abuse. For the first few years, anyway. By the mid-1980s, Trakh found himself coaching a different kind of Ladycat, one who was raised on MTV and the Twisted Sister video, “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”

Trakh: “I was yelling at one of my players, Aimee McDaniel, and she comes over to me and says, ‘See this ball? You want to bring it down?’ I had to accept the fact that I was dealing with a new breed of kid now.”

Trakh kept pace by creating a new breed of coach. At 36, he has stopped asking overzealous parents to step outside and has added the pat on the back to his coaching repertoire. “My old players come to games now,” Trakh says, “and they say, ‘Holy cow, he’s mellowed out.’ ”

The alumni know, but outside the banner-covered walls of the Brea gym, old impressions die harder, especially when they’re still accompanied by the scores of the boorish days. This season, the Ladycats have beaten teams by scores of 111-22, 96-16 and 75-25.

Still pouring it on after all these years?

“So many people around the county really want to believe that,” Trakh says. “They look at the scores and say, ‘That SOB really ran it up on them.’

“But if they read the box score they’d see our third-string guard getting 24 points and Jody Anton getting nine and Nicole Erickson 10. If I was running up the score, Jody and Nicole would get 40 points apiece.

“If I’m playing my third-stringers and not pressing . . . I think it’s more (a reflection on) the disparity of talent than running up the score. The bottom line is that administrators have got to take girls’ basketball more seriously and hire on-campus, qualified coaches. If you treat it like a joke, those scores are going to happen.”

So Trakh prepares for one more flight up the coast and one more title game, his fourth in four years. If the 31-2 Ladycats beat Healdsburg, as they should, that’ll be three State championships in four years.

And if the Division I doors remain locked then?

“I’ve got the greatest high school girls’ job around,” Trakh says. “I could stay here another 12 years and it would be no problem. I have nothing to be bitter about. I would just like to have, maybe, an opening.”