He Makes Time for Olympics : Water polo: Former UCI player Mike Evans promises family that these Games will be his last.

Mike Evans doesn’t have enough time.

Shuttling between practice with the U.S. national water polo team at Newport Harbor High School and his insurance benefits company in Anaheim Hills leaves little time for his family--his wife, Dina, and children, Adam, 7, Cristina, 4, and Benjamin, 2.

“Most of the time I leave in the morning before the children wake up and I come home at night after they’ve gone to bed, and then I’m also out of town a lot, so it’s been kind of tough,” Evans said.

Evans is out of town again. He is in Europe preparing for the Olympics in Barcelona. But this time, he promises, will be the last.

After these Olympics, he is retiring from competitive water polo. No more six-hour-a-day workouts during Olympic years. No more two-week training trips overseas. No more sacrifices.

“As far as me not being able to do other fun things, that’s not a problem, but my wife is with three kids 24 hours a day sometimes without a break for a couple of weeks,” Evans said. “My business suffers because of it. My kids don’t see me much, and as much as I miss them, they miss their dad, too.

“Mostly, I’m concerned about those that it affects aside from myself, and I can’t do much about it.”

Of course, no one is forcing Evans to sacrifice family, business and leisure time to play water polo. He retired once before, for two years after the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, but missed the intensity of competition.

Dina, a former Canadian freestyle skateboard champion, encouraged him to return.

With Evans back in the pool, the United States regained an explosive offensive threat. In the Seoul Olympics, Evans scored 10 goals, tying team captain Terry Schroeder for second on the team.

“Evans is a tremendous athlete,” U.S. Coach Bill Barnett said. “He’s got a lot of clever and brilliant moves to get free--electrifying moves, you might say, to free himself for shots.

“He likes to do what we call reversals. He’ll have the ball, and all of a sudden he’ll reverse around his man and go the other way, or he’ll turn his man and go for the goal.”

Evans, a graduate of Ontario High who honed his game at UC Irvine, admits he is something of a hot dog.

“To me that’s the spice,” he said. “I like to have some fun with it. My job is to do what I can to get open and put the ball in the cage, and over the years I’ve liked playing around and hot-dogging a bit, so if it means flipping the ball over some guy’s head. . . . “

But Evans relishes results more than razzle-dazzle, and one of his most fond memories is helping the U.S. team rally to beat Hungary to advance to the medal round in the ’88 Games.

Because he is an offensive specialist, Evans often is replaced when the United States goes on defense. Late in the match against Hungary, he scored to tie it up, was replaced, and Hungary took another one-goal lead.

Evans then returned to the pool for good, scored the tying goal and later had a chance to score the winner in the closing seconds.

“I came down and was just about to shoot, and I thought, ‘Boy, if I miss this we could lose, if I make it we win,’ then I saw Terry (Schroeder) inside. I faked it in to him and then passed it, and he grabbed it and scored.”

The hot dog passed off?

“You do it when you need to,” Evans said with a slight smile.

Now he says he needs to move on. After Barcelona--and, he hopes, an Olympic gold medal--he’ll be able to dedicate all his time to his family and business. No longer will he have to schedule his entire life with an appointment book.

“Everything I do is scheduled,” he said. “I write everything down. I plan things. I plan family activities, date nights, everything. When I get back, I’ll probably work for a couple of weeks and then take the family camping before school starts.”

You can bet that appointment is written in ink.