Summer League Gives Scouts a Chance to Discover New Talent : Basketball: Professional wanna-bes are scrutinized by NBA and foreign representatives at games at Bren Center.

Greg Ritter walked past a receiving line made up of students from Carl Harvey School after his first game in the ASICS Southern California Summer Pro League.

His debut with the Lakers was mixed. In five minutes, he had no rebounds, but he blocked two shots and made both free throws.

Ritter didn’t play basketball in high school and didn’t go to college. He was 6 feet 3 inches when he graduated from Danville (Ill.) High. But Ritter, 24, grew 13 inches in the 13 months after high school. He is now 7-6, the tallest man the seven students from Carl Harvey have ever seen.

Ritter is mobile for a player his size and the Lakers are giving him a chance to prove himself. He’s a project, but that’s what the league is all about--chances.

His height is magnified when he reaches down to Orlando Adams who, like those alongside him, sits in a wheelchair, confined by cerebral palsy.

Ritter extends his left hand to each of the seven, and they grab it as best they can. Ritter then retreats to the arena floor at the Bren Center. Someone noticing the glee on the faces of the students says to Ritter, “That’s pretty cool, huh?” and Ritter looks down and nods his head yes.

This was the biggest basketball game ever witnessed by Adams, an avid Laker fan who lives in a health care facility in Costa Mesa. Maggie Hampton, the nurse at Carl Harvey--a school in Santa Ana for orthopedically handicapped children--has been trying to get Orlando and the other students into a Laker game at the Forum for two years, she says, but “access is terrible,” and the only seats available are in the nosebleed section. And for wheelchairs, well, it’s not easy.

“This is a godsend,” she says. She is more excited than the students.

The summer pro league is for the fans as much as the players. There are dozens of stories here, but you can only cram so much into one day.

Steve Lee, 20, and Siddarth Gandhi, 19, are UC Irvine students from Laguna Hills. They arrived at 11:30 a.m., which is 30 minutes before they were allowed into the Bren Center. They are seated in the front row behind the scorer’s table at midcourt. They are as close to the players as possible. This is their first day at the summer league.

“We wanted to make sure we got here so we could get good seats for the Lakers-Clippers tonight,” Lee says.

It’s 12:30 p.m., and the first of four games is beginning. The Lakers and Clippers are seven hours from tipoff.

A few sections over, near the top of the lower level, Marian Goins is cheering. There are about 100 people in the 5,000-seat auditorium, and she is clearly the loudest. Her son, Wyatt, is on the OCN-sponsored team playing below. Goins, an ordained minister from Cincinnati, should be on the bench as much as she talks to the players.

“D-up, D-up,” she yells, until an OCN player gets a loose ball. “Push it! Push it! Attababy. Put it up! Swoosh! Way to go, Baby!”

Kevin Weatherby made the basket. He is unrelated to Goins.

Marian and William Goins are avid supporters of the athletic pursuits of their nine children, ages 23 to 36. Five have been at least small-school basketball All-American honorable mention selections. All but one has a college degree, and David is working on it.

The car the family bought for Marian three months ago already has 15,000 miles on it. The one before it had 153,000 before it caught fire. William’s truck, which has also been used to lug kids all over the country, has 160,000.

The family drove to Atlanta for a tryout camp in which the two youngest, twins Wade and Wyatt, were selected to compete in the summer pro league. The older brother by six minutes, Wade, a point guard, is an NAIA first-team All-American who averaged 12.4 points and 12.2 assists per game for 26-7 Urbana (Ohio) University; Wyatt is a shooting guard who averaged 21.3 points and shot 39% from three-point range in 328 attempts for Urbana. They were among the “Faces in the Crowd” in Sports Illustrated on March 15.

But Wade is frustrated as he sits in the stands waiting for his game to begin. He’s on a team that has 15 players, four of them point guards. He played only three minutes--the last three--in the previous game. His team is 0-4.

Each of the boys paid the $300 entry fee for the league, apart from the family’s cost of driving and staying in Southern California.

“We paid our money and tried out,” Wade Goins says. “I should get the opportunity to be seen. Even if I was playing a lot, I’d still say that; everyone should get the opportunity.”

On this day, he will get that opportunity--sort of. He will play a little more than 13 minutes. It’s a start.

A few rows below the Goinses sits Metin Sahin, manager of a second-division team in Antalya, Turkey. He is looking for, as he says, “a short guy.” This is his fourth year at the summer league--his fourth day here--and he has recruited post players each of the first three trips. But his team needs a guard, one that can “do it all,” he says through an interpreter, Alp Bayramoglu, a guard with a first-division team in Ankara.

Bayramoglu was a foreign exchange student in 1988 at Marina High and played basketball for the Vikings. He and is visiting his host family, Janice and Joe Ballestracci of Huntington Beach. He met Sahin three years ago at the summer league when it was at Loyola Marymount.

Sahin hopes to have a list of prospective players within a week to 10 days. Wade Goins is asked if he would go to Turkey. “Are there any wars over there?” he responds. After hearing that Turkey is not Yugoslavia, he says sure. “If the opportunity was there, I’d consider it.”

This is what he would be considering: a tax-free salary between $15,000-$40,000, an apartment and a car. His only expenses would be meals on days he wasn’t playing, and souvenirs for his five brothers and three sisters.

John Forney, an agent for Otis Smith of the University of Findlay (Ohio)--a teammate of Wyatt Goins’--approaches Sahin after the first game. They confer, using broken English.

“I asked him if he liked the way my guy played today,” Forney says. “He said he likes his play.”

Agents and scouts are plentiful here. The players are trying to find positions in the NBA, Continental Basketball League or overseas. Sahin is one of several foreign scouts in attendance; there are two each from Spain and Mexico and others from Germany and France.

“I’m making the rounds every game, even when my players aren’t playing,” Forney says. “The goal is to keep my face in their face and my players on their mind.

“There are no money talks right now, but usually when you hear the word ‘passport’ from one of them, you’re in pretty good position to get your player some contract talks.”

Sahin is searching for “a nice guy, a smiling guy, a good guard who can score, who can take responsibility on the floor--not a famous guy.”

Someone like Wade Goins, perhaps. Except Sahin must see Goins play to make a judgment; it’s not going to happen today.

Bayramoglu, a medical student, sees one of his former coaches from Marina, Paul Hoover, coaching the Orange County team. They decide they’ll go to lunch. They invite Sahin and he accepts.

This is what they miss: Wade Goins’ team, XTRA, is down to two point guards. With XTRA trailing by 12 points with 3 minutes 45 seconds left in the first quarter, Goins enters. A few missed baskets rob him of a few assists, but his defensive hustle breaks up a layup. He scores to make it 27-22 at the end of the quarter, and his three-point basket with 9:30 left in the second quarter ties the score at 31. He exits shortly afterward. He finishes with seven points, two assists, two steals. He is three of four from the field.

Afterward, he is feeling better about his situation and being seen. His coach, former Laker center Mark McNamara, is also feeling good about Goins’ contribution. “I like his game,” McNamara says. “It’s tough to say if he’s got what (scouts) want, but I really like him.”

Wade Goins doesn’t know that Sahin was off tasting fajitas .

Timing is everything.

The Lakers and Clippers tip off on schedule. Steve Lee and Siddarth Gandhi are seated in the front row at midcourt. The crowd has swelled to about 1,700.

Cypress’ Lisa Bonnici, 12, has a four-by-six-inch card with autographs from Jerry West, Randy Pfund, Stu Lantz, Larry Drew, Pooh Richardson, Keith Owens and Anderson Hunt scribbled on it. She is here with about 30 kids from the St. Polycarp School’s fourth annual summer basketball camp. She desperately wants Doug Christie’s signature.

She is stationed in the stands where the players exit the arena floor to go to the locker room. At halftime, she makes a bid for Christie’s signature, but like everyone else, he walks past.

When asked if she would rather have West’s or Christie’s, Lisa says, “Christie’s more modern.”

West does not move easily in public. He stays to the sides of the arena and uses back ways to get from one end to the other. He is working. Autograph hounds sometimes get in the way.

“A couple of times, it was tough to watch the games,” he says. “It’s a little bit distracting. If they send (what they want me to sign) to the Forum, I’d be more than happy to sign it and send it back.”

He says he is uncomfortable with the attention. Flattered, but uncomfortable. “I wish no one knew who I was.”

The Clippers beat the Lakers, 115-104. Doug Christie scores 14 points and has nine rebounds. As he walks off the court, he signs one autograph on his way to the locker room.

It’s for Lisa Bonnici.