UC IRVINE NOTEBOOK / JOHN WEYLER : Baker Among Those Boycotting Conference of Black Coaches

Rod Baker is one of more than 100 black coaches boycotting the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches’ three-day issues forum that begins today in Charlotte, N.C. Baker, along with USC’s George Raveling, Georgetown’s John Thompson and other members of the Black Coaches Assn., will instead meet this morning with the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington.

The coaches are upset about recent NCAA-mandated cuts in coaching staffs and athletic scholarships and say new Proposition 48 academic standards will hurt black student athletes. They have hinted that boycotting regular-season games is a possibility.

For Baker, it’s as much a matter of principle as specific issues.

“They’ve taken away two scholarships from each of the 300 Division I schools,” Baker said. “African-Americans make up about 55% of the athletic pool, so we’re talking about 340 scholarships, which means 340 opportunities to get an education and 340 opportunities lost.

“They took away the graduate assistant, an entry-level position that often went to African-Americans. Now you have the restricted-earnings coach, and there is no other job where the university is told how much the salary will be without regard to how much work is involved.

“We’re starting to get real concerned, but this is not about basketball at all. It’s just that as basketball coaches, we have the opportunity to speak to it right now.”

Baker said that when he arrived at Holy Cross in 1970, he was welcomed with open arms because the conscience of the nation had been stirred by the turmoil of the times. But he’s afraid the pendulum is swinging the other way.

“Let’s take a purely cynical outlook,” he said. “We, as a people, had to threaten and make all these problems in the world for people to think we deserved a chance to better our lives. We had to march on Washington. We had to have Watts and Detroit. Martin Luther King had to talk about things and Malcolm X had to talk about things, always with at least a veiled threat of problems, before people thought we deserved an opportunity.

“So, in the ‘70s, you had a lot of black players going to college because some people thought it was the right thing to do and others thought it was something they had better do. Then we started getting (coaching) jobs. You know, ‘Somebody has to control these . . ., so let’s hire some black coaches.’

“Well, you don’t have to be Einstein to see that it’s going the other way now and I can’t act like it’s not happening.”

By making a stand now, Baker said he hopes to make the world a better place for his children, Zachary, 5, and Rachael, 3.

“I have two kids who mean more to me than anything else in this world, and I don’t want them to face this problem. Twelve years from now, my son’s going to be looking for a college. If I don’t do something to ensure that he has the opportunity, that my daughter has the opportunity, then who cares if I win some basketball games?”

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No game/no pain: Sophomore setter Kristina Osterloh continues to play with aching wrists and no one expects the situation to improve until the season is over.

“She’s in quite a bit of pain,” Coach Mike Puritz said. “She just needs rest. It’s a situation where, because of her bone structure, she has a predisposition to this. She’s already had one surgery and that hasn’t cured the problem. They’re talking about more radical surgery, shaving bone and stuff, but that’s not something Tina’s interested in and I can’t say that I blame her. There’s no guarantee about the results from that either.

“We’re hoping to nurse her through the season and then she needs to re-evaluate her future in terms of volleyball. In athletics, you have to learn to deal with some pain, as long as it’s not an issue off the court. If it starts to interfere with her daily functions, though, then she really needs to re-examine what she’s doing.”

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It’s a P.J. party: Junior forward P.J. Polowski, a transfer from Orange Coast College, picked up his 24th point of the season for the men’s soccer team this weekend with an assist against Cal State Northridge. That’s the second-highest single-season point total in Irvine history. Ken Gunn had 26 points in 1984.

The Anteaters have four more games this season.

Notes

The water polo team, ranked No. 5 in the country, hung on to beat seventh-ranked UC Santa Barbara, 6-5, in the Gauchos’ pool Sunday. At the same time, No. 4 University of the Pacific was upsetting top-ranked Stanford, 10-7. So the Anteaters will be looking at another chance to climb the ratings ladder when they play Pacific at 1 p.m. Sunday in the Heritage Park pool. Irvine leads the series, 33-3, but UOP won the season opener, 9-4, in Stockton. . . . Traci Goodrich led the women’s cross-country team to an eighth-place finish Friday in the Arizona State Invitational. She finished 12th in 17 minutes 43.42 seconds over the 5,000-meter course. Freshman Laura Monson was the second-fastest Irvine runner, taking 42nd place in 18:38.24. The men’s team was 10th, led by Dan Galindo, who covered the 8,000-meter course in 24:54.07 to finish 21st.

The Anteaters will open the basketball season without Chris Brown, a 6-foot-2 three-point specialist from Bakersfield College, because of an oversight in the transfer process. “It was one of those technicalities you run into every once in a while when you think you’ve got things completely covered,” Coach Rod Baker said. “He had plenty enough credits, but it turns out one of the credits he needed for transfer doesn’t happen to transfer to this school and that leaves him one short.” Brown is taking the necessary class and will join the team in mid-December.