Lopez Is Riding Wave of Success Nowadays : Baseball: After guiding Pepperdine to the NCAA title, he has been named coach of the year by two publications.

When the Pepperdine baseball team receives its NCAA championship rings this month, many of the players will proudly display them on their fingers. But Coach Andy Lopez, who began his coaching career at Mira Costa High in 1978, will find another place for his ring.

“I’ll wear it in my heart and in my mind,” said Lopez, who doesn’t wear jewelry.

In his fourth season at Pepperdine, Lopez guided the Waves to their first NCAA baseball championship. Pepperdine defeated Cal State Fullerton, 3-2, to win the title in June.

Lopez, a 1971 graduate of San Pedro High, is no longer a little-known, low-profile coach. He was recently selected as coach of the year by Baseball America and Collegiate Baseball magazines.

But his road to fame and an NCAA title began in 1976, when he began his coaching career as an assistant at Harbor College. After two seasons, Lopez was named coach at Mira Costa. In 1982, Lopez’s final season at Mira Costa, the Mustangs advanced to the championship game of the Southern Section 4-A Division playoffs.

Lopez regards himself as a much different person today compared to the days he led Mira Costa into the 4-A final at Dodger Stadium.

“I’m a lot more relaxed now,” he said. “In my early years, if a guy blew a hit-and-run, I would verbally attack him. Now, if a guy doesn’t give me a good effort, I won’t (yell) at him in front of his teammates, I’ll talk to him in the office. But I don’t even do that very often.”

After the 1982 season, Lopez became the coach at Cal State Dominguez Hills. In his six seasons there, Lopez led the Toros to 168 victories. In 1987, Dominguez Hills won the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. championship and played in the NCAA Division II College World Series in Montgomery, Ala.

Lopez was named the CCAA coach of the year three times. Craig Grebeck, who was the starting shortstop for the Chicago White Sox until a recent injury, and Jim Pena, a relief pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, played for Lopez at Dominguez Hills.

Although they had won 16 of their final 17 games, Pepperdine entered play in the College World Series seeded seventh. They defeated second-seeded Wichita State, 6-0, then beat Texas twice, the second victory highlighted by a grand slam by second baseman Steve Rodriguez. Rodriguez’s homer put Pepperdine in the championship game against Fullerton.

Lopez, who was “pleasantly surprised” to beat Texas twice in the same week, found the championship game to be almost anticlimactic.

“Don’t get me wrong. I hope to get to a few more national championship games. Not to be arrogant, but I remember thinking the night before (the championship game): ‘If we don’t win this thing tomorrow, we don’t deserve to win it.’ I had my five top pitchers available. When we showed up at the yard, I figured that if we couldn’t beat any team in the nation with the pitchers we had, it just wasn’t meant to be.”

Senior right-hander Pat Ahearne combined with reliever Steve Montgomery to limit Fullerton to two runs. During the tournament, Pepperdine established a College World Series record of 24.3 consecutive innings of shutout baseball.

Although primarily an infielder in his playing days, which concluded at UCLA in 1975, Lopez has developed into a knowledgeable pitching coach.

Montgomery, who recently signed a contract with the St. Louis Cardinals, found Lopez easy to work with: “He adjusts to his players very well. Although he is mentally very strong, he doesn’t coach with a one-track mind. He is able to coach different types of players.”

In his first two seasons at Pepperdine, Lopez had an assistant work with the pitchers. Two seasons ago he decided to coach the pitching staff. The results speak for themselves.

Five Pepperdine pitchers were selected in the recent major league draft, including Derek Wallace, a first-round selection of the Chicago Cubs; Montgomery, chosen in the third round, and Ahearne, who was the seventh-round pick of Detroit.

When he decided to pursue a coaching career, Lopez knew he would need to master the mechanics of pitching.

“I learn from everyone,” said Lopez, who had recently finished reading literature on pitching sent to him by the Seattle Mariner organization. “Every day that I show up to a field, whether it be at practice, during a game, or out recruiting, I can learn something. I don’t claim to know it all, I’m just lucky to be learning it.”

With the title behind them, Lopez and his coaching staff are have been busy recruiting players. It is this facet of the coaching business that the Pepperdine coach, who lives with his wife and four children in Thousand Oaks, calls “the dark side.”

“I see it as the dark side because (recruiting) keeps me away from my family,” Lopez said. “In order to recruit well, I literally don’t exist for my family.”

During the recruiting season, Lopez will often leave home at 7 a.m. and return the next morning. But he realizes that to be successful nationally he must continually restock the Pepperdine roster with quality high school and community college players.

“We’ve been pretty successful, pretty lucky in our recruiting,” he said.

“Winning the national championship increased the credibility of the program. We can go into a player’s home and talk not about someday winning a national championship, but in duplicating (the feat). To be honest, if you don’t recruit a quality class to this place every year, it’s your fault.”

Lopez, 38, said there are no secrets to being a successful coach.

“There are certain things that are done at certain times,” he said. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that on a two-and-two count, you are going to start the runner if you have all of the variables.”

The key to becoming a winning coach, according to Lopez, is communicating and managing the players’ different personalities.

“The most successful years I’ve had in coaching I communicated well. I did a better job of accepting mistakes and turning negatives into positives.”

Communication wasn’t necessarily a Lopez attribute when he took the Mira Costa job at the age of 24.

“I wasn’t very mature when I started,” Lopez said. “As a younger coach, I took my self-worth from the outcome of a baseball game. I would take a club to the limit and then I couldn’t get any more out of them because I had pushed them so hard to get to that point. Now I just let the team keep rolling and don’t make us hit a wall.”

Assistant Bill Springman has worked with Lopez at Pepperdine for four seasons.

“Andy does an exceptional job of motivating the players,” Springman said. “Although he is intense at times, he goes with the flow. He can sense what the team needs. He talks about life in general, talks reality to the players.”