UC IRVINE NOTEBOOK : Leitner Resurfaces on Soccer Field
Jaycee Leitner went to UC Irvine after being recruited to play soccer.
But for her first two years, she didn’t play.
Steve Shaw, the coach who had encouraged her to choose Irvine even though he couldn’t offer her a scholarship, left the school before Leitner got there. And with the program in temporary disarray, Leitner went her own way.
Last spring, she turned up again, and Coach Ray Smith has reason to be thankful. Leitner is the team’s leading scorer and has six goals in the team’s past three matches. Her 13 points rank fourth in scoring in the NCAA’s West Region.
“I think I’m playing with fire and intensity again,” said Leitner, who sought out Smith after two years of following the team’s exploits in the school newspaper.
After playing four years of varsity soccer at Los Alamitos High School and a season with the Fountain Valley Sting club team, Leitner turned to a women’s league in Torrance to stay active the past two years.
But when she saw a mention of Kelly Standard, a player she had met years ago at a Santa Barbara soccer camp, in the New University, Irvine’s student paper, she made her move.
“I got real excited reading about them,” Leitner said. “It was mostly because of Kelly. I wanted to get back in touch with her,” Leitner said.
After she watched last year’s young but promising team play, she thought she could help.
“I was seeing they needed forwards, needed scoring,” she said. “Kelly gave me Ray’s number, and I came out last spring.”
Now her enthusiasm for soccer is renewed.
“This has been a big accomplishment for me the last few games,” said Leitner, who is a junior in school but a sophomore in eligibility. “I’ve always been consistent, but I’ve never gotten the acknowledgment.
“For a couple of years I was going, ‘I’m getting old, my body can’t handle it.’ Now, I’ve got the old spark back.”
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Add Ed Green of Coastal Carolina and Fairleigh Dickinson Athletic Director Roy Danforth to the list of candidates interviewing this week for the athletic director’s job.
Green, who interviewed Tuesday and was registered at an Irvine hotel, was athletic director for three years at Coastal Carolina before being reassigned as a special assistant to the chancellor when a new chancellor took over.
Danforth, who was scheduled to check in at the same hotel Tuesday night, is a former basketball coach at Syracuse and Tulane. He guided Syracuse to the 1975 Final Four.
Gary Ness, outgoing New Mexico athletic director, interviewed Monday.
Brad Rothermel, formerly athletic director at Nevada Las Vegas, is scheduled to interview Friday.
Although five candidates are coming to campus this week, more might be interviewed, the chairman of the search committee said Tuesday.
“We’re not down to a final group,” said James McGaugh, a professor of psychobiology and the director of UC Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.
McGaugh, who has declined to name candidates until the field has been narrowed further, is concerned that applicants who have not been contacted might assume they have been eliminated. He said that is not necessarily the case.
“It is my estimate we are down to perhaps a dozen top candidates,” he said.
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The new women’s crew program has its first coach--Mike Long, who was the men’s crew coach at Cal State Long Beach last year.
Women’s crew, which is not sanctioned by the NCAA, was added to Irvine’s program in May as part of an emphasis on providing equal opportunities for women, and in response to student interest. Though it was added at the same time that baseball was eliminated, university officials emphasized that women’s crew is costing the department only $8,000 a year. Baseball’s projected budget last year was $174,382.
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The men’s cross-country program, struggling to regain the ground it lost after it was scheduled to be discontinued, is cramming this fall.
Runners took it easy this summer, not knowing if their program would be revived. Now, without a training base, they are skipping interval and speed workouts and focusing on mileage.
Instead of running 50 to 60 miles a week, as they normally would during the season, they are running 60-70.
“Their legs are a little weary,” Coach Vince O’Boyle said. “They’re going to be running tired. We probably won’t do much (interval training) through September.”
Despite their handicap, O’Boyle hasn’t written off the possibility of repeating as Big West Conference champion.
“They have the talent,” he said. “I think they’ve got a real good chance to do well. It’s going to depend on how much they can catch up in a period of time.”
Anteater Notes
Irvine’s water polo team dropped from third to fifth in the national poll after going 1-4 in the UCI tournament last weekend. Defending NCAA champion California, which finished third in the unusual tournament’s format despite going undefeated, remained No. 1. . . . Popi Edwards, a freshman on the women’s volleyball team, had a career-high 16 kills against Morehead State, and leads the team in kills per game, averaging 2.86.
