UC IRVINE NOTEBOOK / ROBYN NORWOOD : Youth, Injuries Delay Progress of Basketball Programs

They poured the concrete for UC Irvine’s dual basketball rebuilding programs last season.

But construction has hit a snag.

The women’s team is 1-10 and winless in the Big West Conference.

The men are 2-8, also winless in the Big West.

The hall outside the neighboring offices of the second-year coaches, Colleen Matsuhara and Rod Baker, in Crawford Hall is a bit somber. Both teams have visibly better talent than they did last season. But both are lagging behind their victory pace of last season, when the women went 5-22 and the men were 7-22.

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The women’s team is young, with eight freshmen, three sophomores, a junior and a senior.

“I still think it’s just that we have eight freshmen, and they all play like freshmen at one time or another,” Matsuhara said. “Of the returnees, no one has really stepped forward. We need to find some leadership. We’re groping to find someone, and I’m not sure we have anyone who can do it.”

Monday night, the Anteaters lost to Nevada Las Vegas by 42 points.

“We had six people go 0-for,” Matsuhara said. “We missed a couple of wide-open layups. You shoot like that . . . “

Injuries have hurt the team. Yvonne Catala, a senior forward who is the team’s leading rebounder and second-leading scorer, has missed the last two games because of a lower-back injury suffered in a collision during a game against UC Santa Barbara. Freshman guard Davette Williams also has a bad back but is playing through the pain, and Cher Scanlon is hampered by an ankle injury that held her out briefly.

Matsuhara was hired after recruiting was done in 1991, and she went for a long-term fix, not a short-term one, in recruiting freshmen for this season. Nor did she set up a schedule to help pad the victory total this season, instead going against good competition.

The only problem with that approach is that Matsuhara signed a three-year contract, and next year is No. 3.

“I’m not thinking about that right now,” said Matsuhara, whose more immediate concern is how much recruiting and scholarship money will be in the next departmental budget.

The trend in the women’s game right now is international recruiting. Matsuhara says she at least needs to be able to recruit nationally.

In the meantime, she’s waiting for the freshmen to start playing like sophomores, and if they could do it this year, all the better.

“I told them their rookie season is over,” she said.

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The men’s team is looking for answers, too. Irvine played well in close losses to Georgetown and Houston but threw a wrench in its season by losing at home to Utah State and Nevada--two teams likely to be middle-of-the-pack or worse in the Big West.

Irvine is 0-3 without yet playing New Mexico State, Cal State Long Beach or UC Santa Barbara and the Anteaters’ predicted fourth-place finish looks foolish now.

With a week off before Saturday’s game against Cal State Fullerton in the Bren Center, Baker gave his road-weary team two full days off, then made the rest of the week’s practices off limits to family, friends, reporters, administrators and all the others he usually welcomes.

“It’s to delve back inside,” Baker said. “We need to do something.”

Injuries have been a factor, too. All three inside starters have been forced to miss games. Dee Boyer missed three games with a sore shin, Jeff Von Lutzow missed 1 1/2 games with a sprained big toe and LaDay Smith is out for perhaps a month with a stress fracture in his foot. A fourth inside player, Elzie Love, who has started four games, missed one game and a week of practice after a death in his family.

The shortness of inside scoring threats--even when the players are healthy--has been one reason opponents have been able to successfully defend against Irvine. Even though Von Lutzow averages 16.7 points, he scores mostly from the perimeter or in transition.

Irvine’s interior defense hasn’t been very good either, breaking down in games Irvine had a chance to win.

One of Baker’s thoughts after another look at the Nevada game film: “You can’t get too caught up in positions,” he said. “We need five guys who will step up and play.”

That might mean some guard-heavy lineups--although it will be tough to do that against Fullerton, which has strong inside players in Sean Williams and Kim Kemp.

As for the rebuilding effort, Baker has done better than Matsuhara in the recruiting wars, and already has signed Riverside City College forward Daniel Lyton for next season. That’s good for him, because the Anteaters will lose their top two scorers, shooting guard Keith Stewart and Von Lutzow.

Smartest thing Baker did when negotiating his complex contract? He got four years, one more than Matsuhara.

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Pure speculation: What do you suppose Georgia Tech’s upset of No. 1 Duke did for Irvine’s hopes of signing New York City prep star Ed Elisma?

Irvine and Georgia Tech are among Elisma’s choices--some say the final two. Sources say Irvine coaches were convinced they still had the inside track when the season began after Elisma made an oral commitment to Irvine, then retracted, saying he will make his final decision in the spring.

Georgia Tech’s No. 8 ranking aside, the mounting Irvine losses will make choosing the Anteaters harder and harder for Elisma to defend to his friends and high school coach.

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Art of the deals: First, there was Baker’s suit deal, which gave a clothing company advertising in game programs in exchange for supplementing the coach’s sideline wardrobe.

Then, naturally, he procured a dry-cleaning deal to take care of the suits.

Now, the latest deal to come to light is the storage deal. The Baker family needed a place to keep their things while living in temporary housing and waiting to buy in Irvine.

Thus the ad in the Anteater program: “Need storage? Do what Coach Baker did. Call the only self-storage company that comes to you.”

Baker protests good-naturedly that the discount deal saved the university money that would have been considered a moving expense. And he wonders how good an endorsement he is these days.

“I’m sure after this past weekend thousands of Anteater fans ran out to stick their stuff in Easy Access Storage,” Baker said.

Anteater Notes

The men’s tennis team will face its former coach, Greg Patton, on Friday when the Anteaters play Boise State at Albuquerque, N.M. Irvine Coach Steve Clark is a former assistant to Patton, who left for Boise State after last season. . . . Pat Keenan, a junior, was involved in seven victories during the UC Irvine invitational swimming meet last week. He won the 200 and 500 freestyles, the 100 and 200 butterflies and was part of three winning relay teams.