He’s Having a Rocky Freshman Year : College: Rashaan Salaam, a standout while at La Jolla Country Day, isn’t content at Colorado. Berkeley is on his mind.

Rashaan Salaam buckles the chin strap of the gold helmet with the black buffalo each afternoon and moves out of Colorado’s Dal Ward Athletic Center, toward the practices on the artificial turf of Folsom Field, toward . . . where?

One year after the end of his glorious eight-man football career at La Jolla County Day, Salaam is opening some eyes in the Big Eight.

He is a true freshman on a team that, until getting whipped by Nebraska four Saturdays ago, was rated eighth in the nation.

Before reinjuring his ankle Nov. 7 against Oklahoma State, he was third on the depth chart in Colorado’s new one-back offense. Were it not for missing a month during fall camp with a sprained ankle, he might have been higher.

His coaches smile when discussing his future. His teammates have accepted him as they would a veteran and there has been a murmur among some in Boulder that, given the team’s shrinking rushing attack (down from 227 yards per game in 1991 to 103 this fall), Salaam should be even higher on the depth chart.

But then football ends for the day, and Salaam shuffles off to his dormitory, or to the study table. The footballs are locked up for the night and sometimes, his mind stops translating X’s and O’s and starts screaming:

What am I doing here?

“I just don’t like Colorado--the state,” Salaam said. “The main thing that gets to me is there are not enough black people. Out of 25,000 people at the university, all you have is 400 or 500 black people. Everywhere I go, I’m going to be the minority.

“At Cal, there’s a lot more than that.”

Salaam, while showing terrific promise on the football field at the base of the Rocky Mountains, wonders about a school in another conference and hundreds of miles away.

He orally committed to Cal last winter, he said, after visits to UCLA, Washington, Notre Dame and Colorado--but then Coach Bruce Snyder and most of his staff bolted for Arizona State. And Salaam, who turned 18 on Oct. 8, is not your basic, impressionable teen-ager.

Snyder made a brief overture to Salaam about Arizona State. Salaam would just as soon have played football without a helmet.

“Martin Luther King’s birthday is not celebrated in Arizona,” he said flatly. “I refuse to go to any of those schools.”

Arizona voters finally approved a Martin Luther King Day two weeks ago. Too late.

He picked Colorado, telling the Boulder Daily Camera at the time he believed that “if Coach Snyder were still at Cal, I’d go to Colorado. That’s how much I like it.”

Now, he spends long evenings cooped up in dormitory rooms with Lamont Warren--the starting tailback--or in his room, talking to his girlfriend on the telephone.

“We go out but, man, it ain’t the most fun,” Salaam said. “The only thing to do here is hang out in the bars.”

The forward motion in his mind won’t stop. He misses his mother and younger brother, who are at home in San Diego. They usually talk on Sundays.

From time to time, he thinks of transferring to Cal. It would be nice to be closer to home, he tells himself. It would be nice to be in a place where he stands out only because of his football ability, not because of his skin pigmentation.

“I’m going to go through this year and then sit back and look at everything,” he said. “I keep it to myself. I don’t want to sound like a big baby, but when you’re born someplace and live there for 17 years, you’re going to miss it.”

But just when a change begins looking good, Salaam is inserted into a game, the play is called his way and, suddenly, he is at home again, slicing his way through the line, toward the end zone.

It is hard to argue with success, especially early success. Did anyone really think Salaam would immediately turn his eight-man football magic into a Big Eight carpet ride?

“I knew I could do it,” Salaam said.

But he sprained his ankle in August. Twice, he tried to come back and twice, he aggravated it.

“That hurt him quite a bit,” said running backs coach Ben Gregory. “For a freshman who needs to learn the system as quickly as possible, it hurt him from that standpoint.

“And once you get into the season, it’s hard to get a kid (practice repetitions), and that set him back even more. We could see the talent; we just decided we’d have to look at him in a game.

“No one has been disappointed.”

The missed practices hurt even worse because Salaam was coming from an eight-man program--even though he gained 1,594 yards in 123 carries (13.0 yards per carry) as a senior.

“The game is a little more crowded out there,” Gregory said. “In terms of just football lingo, it doesn’t even translate easily.

“And from a coaching standpoint, you can’t take things for granted with him. None of us even know enough about eight-man football to know what he knows and what he doesn’t.”

At the time of the ankle injury, all Salaam knew was frustration.

“When I got injured, I really hated it here,” he said. “I felt the place was bad luck. I was doing real well until I got hurt. Then I came back and got hurt again, came back and got hurt again, and I felt I was through with Colorado.

“I was thinking about (packing up and leaving) but that wouldn’t have been too smart. Everything is not going to be smooth. There are going to be some problems. You’ve just got to stick them out.”

Colorado coaches figure that what Salaam is going through isn’t unusual.

“He’s having to go through all those normal first-time-away-from-home things,” Gregory said. “But he’s adjusting like the other freshmen are adjusting.”

Because of the ankle injury, Salaam didn’t even play until Colorado’s third game, at Minnesota, when he and Coach Bill McCartney agreed that he would not become a redshirt this season.

“The Friday before the game, I said, ‘You’re getting closer to being ready to play,’ ” McCartney said. “ ‘If you’re in our plans this year, we have to make a decision.’ I left it up to him.”

Salaam’s answer: “Coach Mac, I want to play this year. I’ll do anything. I’ll play on special teams.”

So he was placed on a couple of kickoff teams against Minnesota, made a tackle that he ranks as his top moment of the season, and then got his chance at running back.

He carried five times for 61 yards the next week against Iowa, including one 49-yard run to the Hawkeye 16. But he fumbled on the next play.

He didn’t play the next week against Missouri, got in a couple of plays the following week against Oklahoma and then had his best game against Kansas State, going for 75 yards and his first college touchdown on 14 carries. He was picked as Colorado’s “Offensive Back Champion” of the week.

“The plan is to use him more and more,” McCartney said. “It’s just a case of a kid adjusting to the major college scene.

“On the Monday after the Oklahoma game, I said, ‘It looked like you were nervous.’ He said, ‘Nervous? I was scared to death.’ That’s not uncommon, even for a kid from a bigger program.”

Said Gregory: “He will definitely be competing for a starting position here soon. This year or this spring.”

Salaam has 27 carries for 158 yards this season and says that, on the field, he couldn’t possibly ask for much more.

“Everything a freshman could want is coming true for me,” he said.

He has made it through two-a-days, which was the first major adjustment. “It was almost unbearable,” he said.

Then he made it through his ankle injury, fighting to the point where he is almost a regular in the running back rotation.

Now, with things going so well, if he could only elude the feeling of regret that gnaws at him for choosing Colorado.

“I shouldn’t be moaning and groaning,” he said. “Everything is going well. But I should have looked at (the college decision) more.

“My heart is with Cal.”

In a matter of minutes, though, he shifts conversational gears like cutting toward the sideline, bringing up Nebraska’s 52-7 humbling of the Buffaloes.

“I like it here,” he said. “I’ll probably be a Buffalo. We got embarrassed against Nebraska. The freshmen were shocked. Nobody in the freshman class had ever gotten beat that bad.

“We’ve got things to prove to Nebraska. We’ve got to beat them up the next (three) years.”

Salaam stood up and started off toward a running backs’ meeting. After that, he would be off to practice and then toward . . . what?

If only he could feel at home, where the Buffaloes roam.