Fox Misses Coaching Enough to Return

Allen Fox, the 14-year coach of the Pepperdine men’s tennis team who assumed an assistant’s role last season, returned as head coach last week when the team began fall practice.

Fox led the Waves to 13 NCAA tournament appearances before relinquishing the position to Eliot Teltscher. Fox sought a temporary reprieve from the demands of being a head coach.

“People who coach know there’s lots of little negative sides to coaching,” Fox said. “All my friends, when I tell them that I coach the Pepperdine tennis team out in Malibu, they think I’ve died and gone to heaven.

“If you don’t care whether you win or not, coaching is the easiest job ever,” Fox said.

With more free time last season, Fox finished writing his book, “Think to Win.” The book is being published by HarperCollins and will be available in bookstores on Jan. 27. Fox also traveled to Indonesia and to Israel to teach tennis.

Teltscher led Pepperdine to a 16-7 record and an 11th-place ranking. Fox, who had retained the option to return as head coach after a year, felt a pang in his heart.

“There were some questions of whether I would miss it, or whether I would be quite happy not to do it any more, and it turned out I missed it,” Fox said.

Pepperdine returns all its starters from last season, including senior Howard Joffe, who advanced to the semifinal round of the NCAA singles tournament, and 12th-ranked Charles Auffrey.

“I think this team truly lured me back,” Fox said. “They’re really about as solid and stable a team as I’ve ever had. We’re ranked fourth. That’s pretty nice.

“It must be the coaching,” he said with a chuckle.

Even if playing in the Olympics left Joe-Max Moore a little bruised, the experience he gained is valuable to the second-ranked UCLA men’s soccer team.

Moore, a junior midfielder, is one of two players on this season’s UCLA team who played for the United States in all three Olympic matches. Goalkeeper Brad Friedel is the other.

After the Olympics and touring with the U.S. national team, Moore returned to UCLA with a bruised leg for the Bruins’ season opener last month at the Indiana tournament. Although he was injured, Moore scored for a 1-0 victory over ninth-ranked Indiana.

“I guess I wasn’t even supposed to play. I got in for 15 minutes and got a goal, so it was worth it,” Moore said.

Moore was UCLA’s most valuable player in 1991 after leading the Bruins with 18 goals, seven of which were game-winners.

Moore led Mission Viejo High to the 1989 Southern Section 3A championship and was voted the Times’ Orange County offensive player of the year.

He scored the only U.S. goal in the opening-game 2-1 loss to Italy in the Olympics.

At Barcelona, Moore especially liked the free bowling, free pool and free video games at the Olympic Village. And, of course, meeting the men’s basketball team. “It was incredible,” Moore said. “Just shaking their hands and knowing what they’re all about. It was really cool.”

Bryan Schultz, a freshman goalkeeper on the Cal State Long Beach men’s water polo team, gained an edge last week over junior goalie Derrick Davis in the competition for the starting spot.

Schultz led the eighth-ranked 49ers (1-7) to an 8-7 victory over sixth-ranked UCLA (5-3) with 10 saves, including one with 24 seconds to play to preserve the victory.

Long Beach Coach Ken Lindgren has not yet decided on a starting goalkeeper, because 1991 Big West honorable mention goalkeeper Duff Harold finished his eligibility.

“We still are kind of alternating two goalies, so (Schultz) still hasn’t won the post, but he certainly took a step forward,” Lindgren said.

If there is no one left to challenge Lisa Fernandez, she challenges herself.

Last season, Fernandez led the UCLA women’s softball team to its fourth NCAA championship in five years. She had a 29-0 record, an 0.14 earned-run average and a .401 batting average. Her performance earned her a second consecutive Honda Award last week as the nation’s best softball player.

Fernandez believes there still is room for improvement.

“I’ve kind of set the standards a lot higher, seeing that it is my last year,” Fernandez said. “I (am) looking for an 0.00 ERA, I (want) to bat around the .420 range and I want to hit around 10 home runs, so I’ve been working pretty hard.”

Notes

Deanna Doolittle became the all-time digs leader for the Loyola Marymount women’s volleyball team on Friday night when she had nine during a 15-4, 9-15, 15-10, 15-7 victory at Gonzaga to bring her total to 1,136. Doolittle, a junior, surpassed Leslie Wohlford, who had 1,129 digs from 1985-1988. Doolittle closed to within three of Wohlford’s record on Sept. 25 in a loss to San Diego State. But she sat out the Lions’ last match against Cal Poly SLO on Sept. 29 because of a lower back problem.

Before this season, Indiana was the nation’s dominant men’s collegiate soccer program since 1980 in terms of victories (217-42-22) and winning percentage .811, counting each tie as half a victory. But the Hoosiers began the season with a 5-3 record. UCLA eclipsed Indiana in winning percentage this season, when the Bruins’ 7-0-1 start gave UCLA a 207-39-29 record since 1980. That’s an .807 winning percentage. Sigi Schmid became UCLA’s coach in 1980.

Modern technology is not lost on Allen Fox, who describes his theory in “Think to Win”: “Tennis strokes are the hardware and most people spend all their time on the hardware. . . . Tennis strategy is the software. That fools people in computers, and it fools them in tennis. There’s a lot more work done on the hardware than on the software in tennis. You certainly can’t do without the software.”