Graff Takes It Easy After Close Call

Mitch Graff, a second-year assistant on the Pierce College baseball team, is counting his lucky stars.

While pitching batting practice to the Brahmas on Friday, Graff was hit in the head by a line drive off the bat of Brian Basowski even though Graff was pitching from behind a protective screen.

The impact, which required brief hospitalization, fractured Graff’s skull above the right ear and caused a blood clot in his head.

“Right now I’m doing bed rest,” Graff, 31, said from his home. “The doctors want the blood clot to dissolve by itself but don’t want it to move, so I have to stay put. All I’m taking is Tylenol.”

Graff said he has had two CAT scans since Friday and plans to see a neurologist today.

The former Chatsworth High, Pierce and Cal State Northridge player said he doesn’t remember being hit.

“I remember everything before and after,” Graff said. “I remember spinning around, falling to the ground and feeling sick. I remember going over to the dugout and hearing the ambulance siren coming in. . . . They (doctors) tell me I’m lucky I remember anything.”

The accident, Graff said, shook Basowski.

“He felt so bad,” said Graff, who had never been hit in the head playing baseball. “He and his mom came to the hospital to see me. I told him not to feel bad. It was just a freaky accident.”

KEEP THE FAITH

Without conference affiliation and a championship or playoff berth to shoot for, these are the dog days of winter for the Northridge men’s basketball team. Or, at least, they could be.

Pete Cassidy, Northridge’s coach, is hopeful his team gets sufficient charge from winning to keep its spirits high for the final five games. That’s one reason Cassidy was so pleased with the Matadors’ effort in a 65-63 victory over Southern Utah last Saturday.

“I think it’s a big win for us because we’re heading into the last few games of the season,” Cassidy said. “We have a chance to win several of those games, but not if we’re down and depressed. I think this is a catalyst game for us. We’re going to attack the rest of the season.

“It’s hard when you’re not in a conference to keep the emotional edge, the competitive edge, especially when there is nothing there at the end of the season. Winning sharpens the edge. And I don’t care about losing building character. So does winning. We have a lot of character when we win.”

ALMOST PRIME TIME

He played only eight minutes against Southern Utah, but in that short span guard Robert Hill made a large and positive impression on Cassidy.

“Robert Hill just keeps impressing me more and more and more every day,” Cassidy said. “He is, I think, the hardest worker we have in the program right now. Every day he warms up with the type of gusto and energy that I like to see guys warm up with, even every day in practice. And it shows.”

Hill missed his only shot, but he grabbed three rebounds and played tenacious defense. “He contributed heavily, in my opinion, with some key rebounds, keeping the ball alive,” Cassidy said. “Defensively, he did an excellent job. I’m very high on him.”

Hill, a freshman from North Hollywood High, has earned increased minutes playing opposite point guard Andre Chevalier, the player he used to replace.

“Andre is such a good shooter that you’d like to relieve him of that point-guard responsibility at times so he can focus on scoring,” Cassidy said.

“There’s a lot of responsibility just being a point guard, for gosh sakes, without feeling like you have to have that much of the scoring responsibility. With Robert on the floor, it frees him up somewhat for that.”

YARDSTICK FOR SUCCESS

In five of Northridge’s nine victories this season, forward Chris Yard has reached double figures in scoring and rebounding. A coincidence? Not likely.

Cassidy believes Yard will continue to improve as his confidence grows.

“It’s that transition from community college to Division I it takes something, especially in his position, inside, with his size,” Cassidy said. “When you’ve had the number of shots swatted early in the season as he’s had swatted, your confidence is apt to wane.”

Yard, a 6-foot-6 transfer from Lassen College, had 18 points and 11 rebounds to lead Northridge past Southern Utah. Equally important, he held Richard Barton, the Thunderbirds’ high-scoring center, to four points in the second half.

Barton had scored 23 when Southern Utah defeated Northridge by 25 points two weeks earlier. He had 13 in the first half of Saturday’s game.

NO DEFENSE, NO TITLE

Philip Mathews, the men’s basketball coach at Ventura, firmly believes that hard-nosed defense, not flashy offense, wins state titles.

That’s the main reason Mathews was so upset with his team’s performance in a 90-72 victory over host Santa Barbara City in a Western State Conference North Division game Saturday night.

Although the victory was the ninth in a row for No. 1-ranked Ventura (30-1, 6-0 in division play) and clinched a share of the Pirates’ third division title in a row, Mathews was unhappy with his team defense.

“I’m not concerned with our offense; we can score with anybody,” Mathews said. “But our defense was not good tonight and that concerns me.”

MEET THE PRESS

No team had tried to employ a full-court press against Ventura this season until Saturday night, but after watching the Pirates struggle mightily against it--especially in the last five minutes of the first half--Mathews expects to see it again.

“That’s the first time a team has pressed us this season and it caught us off guard,” Mathews said. “But we still should have handled it better than we did. We practice against it, but we did not handle it well. We just have to convert what we do in practice into game situations.”

NEWCOMER

Now that he has qualified for the U.S. team that will compete in the World Junior (age 19 and younger) cross-country championships in Amorebieta, Spain, on March 28, J.J. Castner of UC San Diego figures it might be time to get serious about distance running.

Castner, a freshman from Oak Park High, placed fourth in the U.S. trials race Feb. 6 in Sandy, Ore. The top six finishers in the 8,000-meter race qualified for the U.S. team.

“I didn’t expect to finish that high,” Castner said. “It was very surprising. I knew going in that the top six would make the U.S. team, but I didn’t really think I had a chance at doing that before the race.”

Once the race started, however, Castner’s attitude changed quickly.

“I was right in the thick of it all at two miles,” Castner said. “Right about then, I thought it was possible for me to make the team.”

Castner’s accomplishments are not bad for a guy who was good, but not great, in high school. He placed fifth in the 1991 state Division IV cross-country championships and had a personal best of 9 minutes 40.09 seconds in the 3,200 meters.

“I’ve never gotten really serious-serious about (running), but I’m getting there,” Castner said. “Running has always been something that I do and I enjoy, but it wasn’t until I got out of high school that I started to get what I would call serious about it.”

END OF THE ROAD

When Santa Monica cornerback Derrick Stewart signed a letter of intent with Arizona earlier this month, it marked the end of a long-term athletic partnership between him and Santa Monica tailback Brett Washington, who signed with Hawaii.

They became close friends while playing in a youth baseball league and attended Nobel Junior High in Northridge and Granada Hills High before continuing their careers at Santa Monica.

“It makes me kind of sick to think about us not playing together,” said Stewart, who took a recruiting trip to Hawaii. “But in the end, we each had to go to the school which would give us the best opportunities. For Brett, that was Hawaii. They run a one-back offense and that suits Brett perfectly.

“But for me, Arizona was the best choice. That’s where I feel I’ll have the best opportunity to make the biggest impact.”

Washington (6-feet, 240 pounds) gained 1,082 yards and scored 10 touchdowns and earned All-Western State Conference South Division honors last season.

Stewart (5-10 1/2, 188) was a second-team South Division selection in 1992 after earning first-team honors in 1991.

Staff writers Fernando Dominguez, Mike Hiserman and John Ortega contributed to this notebook.