L.A. UNIVERSITY BEAT / WENDY WITHERSPOON : Car Crash Does Not Deter UCLA’s Walls

Nancy Kerrigan is not the only female athlete to overcome a traumatic injury in recent weeks and perform well in competition.

Consider Kristen Walls, a UCLA diver who won the Pacific 10 three-meter championship for the second consecutive year Thursday, then won the one-meter title for the third consecutive time Friday during the conference championships at USC.

In January, Walls was injured while driving home from diving practice in Pasadena. She suffered whiplash and a strained lower back when another car rear-ended hers, and could not practice for two weeks.

The road to recovery was not only painful for Walls, a senior, but also difficult mentally.

“I was ready (before the accident) to just glide through the year and have everything go well,” she said.

Walls returned to practice one week before UCLA’s Feb. 12 dual meet with USC, where she won the one-meter event and placed third in the three-meter board competition.

But the accident, coupled with the pressure Walls felt to defend her titles in the Pac-10 meet, put her through an emotional wringer. She said UCLA Coach Tom Scotty helped her overcome her difficulties and gain mental toughness.

“I really felt like, mentally, I was in control (after talking to Scotty) and it really felt good to compete and do well,” Walls said.

Since arriving at UCLA in 1989, Walls has dominated the collegiate diving scene. In dual meets last season, she finished first 14 times and second twice.

Walls has never won an NCAA title. Her best finish was in 1992 when she placed seventh on the one-meter board. This season, however, she has a good chance to finish among the top eight in both events at the NCAA Championships in Indianapolis March 17-19.

After that, Walls, an honors student, expects to receive her degree in physiological science next fall and then devote her energy to training for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Walls qualified for the U.S. national team after finishing fourth on the one-meter board, which is not an Olympic event, during the U.S. indoor meet at Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1992. Her best national finish on the three-meter board, which is an Olympic event, was a third place in the U.S. outdoor meet at USC last August.

It is somewhat surprising that Walls has reached such a high level because she did not begin diving until she was 13, considered a late age for divers.

But the former gymnast displayed an aptitude for diving right away, placing second on the one-meter board in the 1986 U.S. Junior Olympic Diving Championships at Orlando, Fla.--after training for only a few months.

Walls attended Monte Vista High in San Diego but trained in Los Angeles on weekends and during the summers of her last two years in high school. This often meant missing out on a normal, teen-age social life.

“I loved diving so much that it was worth it,” Walls said.

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Leave it to Al Scates, coach of the top-ranked UCLA men’s volleyball team, to tell it like it is.

“We’ve been fairly unstoppable,” Scates said.

He’s right. The defending NCAA champion Bruins (9-1) have made a key improvement, using Jeff Nygaard, a junior who started for the U.S. national team at middle blocker last summer, as opposite hitter this season, and he’s hitting .438. Middle blocker Tim Kelly leads the Bruins, hitting .488.

Unlike many coaches, Scates is not afraid to voice confidence in his team. Asked if he thinks UCLA will continue to overwhelm opponents, Scates said: “I think we’ll be doing that all year.”

Quite a statement considering the schedule the Bruins will play this week.

UCLA will face eighth-ranked San Diego State (9-5) tonight in Pauley Pavilion at 7:30, then play at 10th-ranked Cal State Northridge (6-4) Thursday at 7 p.m., before returning home to take on seventh-ranked Indiana Purdue Ft. Wayne (7-3) Saturday at 7 p.m. in the Wooden Center.

The biggest match of the season will be on March 18 when the UCLA meets second-ranked USC at 5 p.m. in Pauley Pavilion. That match will be televised live on Prime Ticket.

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The Trojans (10-0) remain the only undefeated men’s volleyball team in the country.

USC led the nation in team hitting last week and is currently at .403. Eric Seiffert, a freshman middle blocker from Capistrano Valley High who leads the team at .446, was voted the American Volleyball Coaches Assn.’s player of the week Monday.

In its biggest test of the season, USC beat fifth-ranked Stanford (7-5), 15-10, 13-15, 15-10, 15-12, Saturday at Lyon Center.

USC will play at sixth-ranked Pepperdine (5-4) tonight and at 14th-ranked Loyola Marymount (4-9) Friday night, both matches starting at 7 p.m.

The Lion-Trojan match will pit brother against brother. Jim McLaughlin is in his fifth year as USC coach, and his younger brother Rick is in his second year as Loyola Marymount coach. It will be the second time they have faced one another as coaches of these teams. In their first meeting last season, USC won, three games to none.

Notes

The second-ranked UCLA softball team (7-2), which finished third Sunday at the UNLV tournament, will play host to No. 11 Cal in a doubleheader Friday at 1 p.m.

Seven new members were inducted into the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame Saturday in the school’s J.D. Morgan Center: basketball’s Don Bragg, whose 751 rebounds in 1952-55 ranks him 11th on the school’s list; Denise Curry, who set a collegiate record by scoring in double figures in each of the 130 games she played for the Bruins in 1978-81, and led the U.S. basketball team to a gold medal in the 1984 Olympics; John Richardson, defensive guard in 1963-1966, who went on to play seven years in the NFL; Larry Rundle, star of the Bruins’ first national championship volleyball team in 1965; John Sciarra, quarterback in the Bruins’ 1975 Rose Bowl victory over Ohio State; Kiki Vandeweghe, who led UCLA into the 1980 NCAA basketball championship game against Louisville, then played 13 years in the NBA, and Peter Vidmar, two-time NCAA all-around champion in 1982 and ‘83, who led the U.S. men’s gymnastics team to the gold in 1984.