L.A. UNIVERSITY BEAT / WENDY WITHERSPOON : UCLA Softball Team Can Play Some Hardball

There is a team in Los Angeles that has dominated its sport for over a decade. Of the past 11 national championships, it has won seven.

Showtime for this team, however, does not mean bright lights and Hollywood celebrities. This team is lucky if more than a few hundred people wander up the hill in Westwood, and peek behind the trees to see the unlighted field where it plays.

Such is fame for the UCLA women’s softball team.

Its reigning queen is Lisa Fernandez. She has won the Honda Award the past two years, recognizing her as the best player in the sport.

Fernandez has brought new standards to the game. Consider her 1992 statistics: 29-0, 22 shutouts, 65 consecutive scoreless innings, an earned run average of 0.14, four runs given up, 220 strikeouts, one no-hitter and six one-hitters in 196 innings. And she batted .401.

Fernandez, a senior, has helped UCLA win two NCAA championships during her tenure, in 1990 and 1992. This season, she has her sights set on a third.

The Bruins return their entire team from last season with the exception of two major players: Yvonne Gutierrez, a power hitter, and DeDe Weiman, a pitcher.

Gutierrez, who finished her eligibility last season, broke the school record with 11 home runs in 1992. She batted .369 in her career.

Weiman, who will sit out the season as a redshirt, was 11-1 last season with an 0.51 ERA and 138 strikeouts in 82 1/3 innings. She also played first base.

Weiman’s absence breaks up the pitching trio of Fernandez, Weiman and Heather Compton, which led the Bruins during the past three seasons. Last season, they had a staff ERA of 0.37.

The top-ranked Bruins split a doubleheader with 14th-ranked Cal State Northridge in their season opener on Feb. 11. UCLA defeated third-ranked Fresno State, 1-0, Saturday, in the first game of a doubleheader before the second game was called because of darkness.

The Bruins return to UCLA’s Sunset Field March 4, when they play host to UC Santa Barbara.

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For most spectators, this is the problem with softball: it seems as if no one ever gets a hit.

In an effort to give hitters a break, the NCAA introduced a new softball this season.

The ball has a polycarbonate core which is different from the previous, cork core. The new ball is expected to travel up to 25 feet farther.

It looks a little funny--it is made of neon-yellow leather with red stitching--but it has done the trick.

Gutierrez sat in the stands, amazed, while three home runs were hit in UCLA’s home opener against Northridge.

“I’m just kind of sad that they got it now and not when I was there,” said Gutierrez, whose 19 home runs in her career is one of many UCLA batting records which likely will be broken.

UCLA’s pitchers were less enthusiastic.

“It’s obvious that they are going to do whatever it takes . . . for any pitcher, to not have an ERA,” Fernandez said. “I mean, that’s obvious. Pitchers have to change their mentality. There are not going to be many shutouts and there are not going to be as many no-hitters or as many perfect games as there were at one time.”

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Women’s soccer is a hot commodity for local athletic departments these days, but on one local campus, the sport is getting the cold shoulder.

In the past seven months, three local universities announced that they will add women’s soccer as an NCAA Division I sport in the 1993-94 academic year. The schools are USC, Pepperdine and Loyola Marymount.

At UCLA, however, athletic administrators have told members of the women’s club team that they will have to be patient, saying there is no room for the sport in the athletic department budget.

But the players are tired of waiting. They claim that UCLA is in violation Title IX, the federal law that requires male and female students to be treated equally in all areas of education, including athletics.

The players gathered at the center of the UCLA campus on National Women in Sports Day, Feb. 4, handing out fliers entitled: “Fight for Equality for Women in Sports.”

The fliers listed several facts which allegedly showed inequities between men’s and women’s sports at UCLA, which supports 12 men’s sports and nine women’s at the NCAA Division I level.

Judith Holland, UCLA’s senior associate athletic director, said she does not know if UCLA is in compliance with Title IX, and, “That’s not for me to decide.”

UCLA’s lack of an NCAA Division I women’s soccer program seems odd because its men’s team is so prominent, winning national championships in 1985 and 1990.

The UCLA women’s team has advanced to the national club championships in Austin, Tex., the past two years.

The situation has grown increasingly frustrating for the club’s players because most of their local competition has been elevated to NCAA Division I status.

“I think that women’s soccer has a valid point,” Holland said. “They have an interest level (at UCLA) that we should acknowledge and if we weren’t caught up in this financial problem at the moment, it would just be added. So, I guess they came along at a bad moment for us.”

Holland acknowledged that members of the UCLA women’s club team have been knocking on her door since 1979.

Jill Ratner, UCLA team captain, has spoken with an attorney and with representatives at the National Organization for Women who agree that UCLA should make women’s soccer a Division I sport.

Notes

Amy Thorne of the UCLA women’s gymnastics team tumbled into school history Friday night, scoring a 10.0 for her floor routine as the Bruins defeated Brigham Young, 193.20-192.5. It is the first perfect score in UCLA history. . . . Brent Hilliard of the Cal State Long Beach men’s volleyball team broke the NCAA record for kills in a career. Hilliard’s 29 kills against Indiana Purdue Ft. Wayne Feb. 6 ran his total to 2,432, surpassing the record of 2,380 set by Brian Ivie of USC from 1988-91.