Veteran Fawcett Still Kicking to All Fields : Soccer: The former Joy Biefeld, a graduate of Edison High, plays for three teams--including U.S. national squad--and is a coach.

The pay is low. The hours are long. The rewards are few.

Ask Joy Fawcett to compile pro and con lists of why she remains on the women’s national soccer team, and one yea outweighs a multitude of nays.

“She does it because she loves it,” said Walter, Fawcett’s husband of two years. “If she was doing it for attention or money or anything else, she wouldn’t be doing it.”

Fawcett seconded the motion, “I do it because I love it so much. “

Enough that Fawcett, a Huntington Beach native who recently bought a house with Walter in Lake Forest’s Foothill Ranch, devotes almost every waking hour to the game.

The U.S. national team, of which Fawcett has been a member for six years, is a small part, albeit a very important one, of her multifaceted affiliation with soccer. The 1986 Edison High and 1990 California graduate also plays for Ajax, a Los Angeles-based club team, and for a Southern California state team that recently returned from a tournament in Indianapolis.

Although Fawcett, formerly Joy Biefeld, never saw coaching as a serious career move, she is making significant inroads in the profession.

Sometime this week she will scoot up the freeway for a get-acquainted session at UCLA, where in August she will officially take over the head coaching responsibilities for a women’s soccer program that is making the transition from club to intercollegiate competition.

Next week, she will chaperon a regional 14-and-under youth team, of which she is an assistant coach, to the Western regionals in Seattle.

In addition to her playing and coaching duties, Fawcett represents Diadora and Proctor & Gamble, two of her primary sponsors.

“Summer months are pretty busy,” said Fawcett, who usually teaches summer soccer camps but is cutting back to allow for more family activities. “I don’t have a lot of time off.”

Her age earned her a brief reprieve. Fawcett, 25, will miss the World University Games next month in Hamilton, Ontario, because she is is too old.

But if anyone can juggle a hectic schedule, Fawcett can, said Todd Saldana, Ajax coach and an assistant for the UCLA men’s team.

Saldana was a part of the selection committee that chose Fawcett for the Bruin job, a committee that was willing to take a risk--with her schedule and limited college coaching experience--because it felt so strongly she was the right person for the position.

“She’ll find a way to make it work,” Saldana said. “It will be difficult. There will be some ups and downs, but with her ‘go, go, go’ attitude, she can get it all done.”

Despite the normal butterflies, it is a job Fawcett, who coached the Long Beach College women last season, looks forward to.

“I’m very excited to be in on the ground floor,” she said. “It’ll be tough, but I’m going to take all I’ve learned and apply it.”

Which is a considerable amount of information. National team Coach Anson Dorrance said two things could happen when she takes over the soccer reigns at Westwood.

“There will be a transition period where she realizes how much she knows,” Dorrance said. “First, because she is so good and is used to playing at such a high level, she can become annoyed with having to train inferior athletes. Or she can serve as a tremendous role model.

“With her experience, she can provide incredible insight into everyone she trains.”

Throughout the years, Dorrance and Fawcett’s former coaches have been trying to provide her with their insights into her vast soccer talents, with varying degrees of success.

“She’s ingratiatingly humble,” Dorrance said. “She deflects compliments and shares her success with the rest of the team.”

Wonderful qualities unless they have a detrimental effect on the team. Dorrance said until recently, Fawcett, who has moved from midfielder to defender and back again, would hold back and allow what she considered the team’s bigger names to carry the brunt of responsibility.

Once Fawcett realized the so-called superstars were under too much pressure to produce, she stepped up her game.

“She was too humble to go after it,” Dorrance said. “She had this respect of the superstars and was always in deference to them. But she’s becoming more confident and improving more as a result. Once she started to assert herself, the other girls didn’t have all the pressure on them. She’s taking over games more and more.”

Fawcett admitted she’s “getting better.”

“All the international experience has improved my game. I’m a little more confidant, which is what I need. I’m taking on a bigger role.”

Only now is Dorrance beginning to see flashes of what he believes she is capable of.

“She’s an extraordinary talent,” he said. “The only thing she needs to work on is her understanding of how good she is.”

Dorrance cited Fawcett’s fine mixture of marathoner’s endurance and sprinter’s speed--rare but vital qualities for her position--that puts her head and shoulders above the rest.

“They help her produce these amazing plays,” he said. “If she can produce those consistently, (opponents) are going to be wondering what she’ll be doing next time she runs down the field.”

He is hard-pressed to single out one game in which Fawcett shined, but pointed to America’s first victory over Italy earlier this year--a 5-0 decision--and the June 21 shutout (3-0) over Canada, where she scored twice at Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome.

“She had extraordinary moments in each game,” he said. “But Joy never had bad games. She had good and great games.”

Fawcett’s greatest thrill in the sport was being a part of the United States’ World Championship victory in 1991 in China. She never thought her playing career would last this long, but since it has, she sees another World Championship--in 1995 in Sweden--and possibly the 1996 Olympics in her future.

“The World Championship was my major goal, a dream come true,” she said. “Now that’s arrived and gone. Right now, I plan on going to the next World Championships, as long as I continue to be on the team. Then the Olympics are a year later, so I’d like to stick with it.”