A Little Racket, a Little Respect

Bill Tilden slept here. So did Little Mo Connolly, Don Budge, Jack Kramer, Billie Jean King, Jimmy Connors and Tracy Austin. They slept here, they belted tennis balls here, they held trophies aloft here.

Since 1896, except for the occasional outbreak of world war or hoof-and-mouth disease, they have held the Ojai Valley Tennis Tournament here. If you can accept orange juice and oak trees as reasonable substitutes for strawberries and ivy, this is as close as American tennis gets to Wimbledon tradition, complete with tea tents and picnic blankets spread alongside the outside courts.

“Shangri-La,” is what UC Irvine tennis Coach Greg Patton calls it. “If you’re a tennis player,” Patton says, “when you die and go to heaven, this is where God sends you.”

Into this setting Saturday afternoon strode one Roseann Alva, clad in gray tank top and blue baseball cap, playing for a college division championship and representing Cal State Fullerton.

Yes, Cal State Fullerton.

Before Saturday, many of the curiosity seekers huddled around Alva’s match didn’t know Cal State Fullerton even played tennis. This is understandable. In 1987, Fullerton dropped its men’s tennis program, but in 1992 the Titan men won no fewer matches than the Titan women.

The Titan men went 0 for 0.

The Titan women went 0 for 20.

“I call recruits,” says Bill Reynolds, the in-the-flesh Fullerton tennis coach, “and they say, ‘You have a tennis team?’ And these are girls from Orange County. They think there’s only one school that plays tennis in the county. ‘You’re in Orange County?’ I tell them, ‘I think so.’ We are in Orange County. Aren’t we?”

It can get confusing when you’re competing against the monolith at UC Irvine, to say nothing of USC and UCLA and Pepperdine, and you’re invisible in the victory column. Oh and 20? And a Titan is in the Big West championship match?

In 93 sessions, The Ojai had never seen anything like it.

Alva didn’t win the championship, losing to UC Santa Barbara’s Debbie Goldberger, 6-2, 6-2, in the final of the conference’s No. 1 women’s singles flight, but that’s almost obscuring the point. In a year and at a school where fringe sports that don’t win get axed--volleyball Coach Jim Huffman lost so often he lost his team--Alva’s mere presence on the court was crucial evidence that tennis at Fullerton was alive and breathing . . . and worthy of sustaining that condition.

“This is exciting,” Reynolds declared. “With the year we’ve had, to get a player so close to the winner’s circle really helps. It lets people know that, yes, Cal State Fullerton is still out there.”

Alva was the perfect messenger, too--the embodiment of the take-whatever-we-can-get Fullerton athletic experience.

Across the net, Goldberger loped gracefully in designer top and skirt, her long brown hair gathered down her back in a Mary Jo Fernandez braid. Alva, a self-described “big girl who hits hard,” was trudging from line to line and slamming forehands all over the court. Her cap and tank top were Cal State Fullerton-issue, her pleated skirt was a sun-faded orange, her whole game looked as if it had just been dragged in from the neighborhood park--which, as a matter of fact, it was.

“Players come up to me and ask, ‘What club are you from?’ ” Alva says with a smile. “I tell them ‘PCCC.’ The Public Courts Country Club.”

Alva learned the game from her father, a rec league player, and his sparring partners. “Just people ,” Alva says. No club pros, no $75-an-hour tutors, no formal training, really, until she enrolled at Carlsbad High School. “My parents didn’t have a lot of money,” she says.

Alva was a decent player in high school, 15th-ranked among her age group in Southern California, but decent in Southern California only gets you scholarship offers from Idaho and Utah.

Alva didn’t even get those.

“No one recruited me,” she says. “I did all the pursuing. I wrote letters to 10 schools. I looked at UCI, San Diego State, Fullerton. I was thinking about Hawaii. But the only school that would give me a scholarship was Fullerton.”

In truth, Alva was offered one-third of a scholarship. Reynolds has only one scholarship, total, to give every year, so he splits it three ways--and then tries to recruit the other half of his team on hope and promises and such fund-raising innovations as “servathons,” in which Reynolds’ players serve as many balls as they can within one minute (faults don’t count) at 50 cents-or-whatever per serve.

“We raised $900 on that this year,” Reynolds says proudly.

Still, it’s a far cry from the eight full scholarships offered by Big West rivals Pacific and Nevada Las Vegas. Reynolds shrugs. You coach at Fullerton, you live on the shoestring.

Reynolds treads lightly around the issue of the cash-guzzling football program, but notes that “when Long Beach dropped football, boom , the women’s tennis team got two more scholarships. Look how that program’s turned around. I lost a couple of recruits to them because of that.”

Alva says, “I came to Fullerton at a tough time. We’re right in the middle of a transition period, where there have been cuts and most of the money is going toward football, and it’s kind of a bummer. Hopefully, down the road, the football program will make it and bring in money for the other sports.

“Right now? I try not to let it upset me. It bugs me only when I let it, those times when I get selfish. It’s just that it seems so small--if we could just get another scholarship. That’s $1,000. And it is small, when you compare it to (other schools’) budgets of millions.”

Alva, a junior, will be back next year, as will the Titans’ Nos. 3 through 6 singles players. They will also regain Marni Matsumoto, injured in a midseason automobile accident, and Lorraine Lau, who sat out this season to concentrate on her studies.

“I have high hopes for next year,” says Alva, who sees herself as being in on the ground floor. Saturday, she may have started something. A Titan reached the finals at Ojai. It can be done.

Building a tennis program from the bottom up can be daunting work, but in Rosie, the Titans have finally found a riveter.