A Place To Call Home--Finally : Lance Fay Once Spurned Ventura; Now, He’s a Key Player for Team

The schools were separated by only a few miles but to Lance Fay, their basketball programs were worlds apart.

He knew it and still chose the wrong one. For his style of play, anyway.

Fay, a 6-foot-2 sophomore guard at Ventura College, could have joined the powerful Pirates straight out of Buena High three seasons ago but opted for the promising program at Oxnard.

It was not his slickest move.

“We had a lot of good freshmen that year but it never panned out,” Fay said. “With the guys we had on the team, we should have been 25-5.”

Shoulda. Woulda. Couldn’ta.

The Condors, torpedoed by internal strife, never achieved their potential that season.

But none of that matters to Fay anymore, because now he is a key figure on a team with a legitimate shot at the mountaintop. Now, he is at Ventura, the place he admits was better suited for him all along, where they play at the wide-open pace he likes.

The transition is working fine.

After redshirting last season, Fay is averaging 9.7 points, has 29 steals and is the team’s co-captain with freshman center Curtis Ganes. The numbers are not overwhelming, but that’s because Ventura Coach Philip Mathews this season resurrected his “Orange and Black” scheme, a system that rotates two five-man units into action every few minutes.

In that system, each unit is on the floor for about 20 minutes a game. One unit starts one game and the other might start the next. It’s not the ideal format for someone with visions of grandeur but it’s one that Fay says serves an important purpose.

“We all have to put aside the pride of starting,” Fay said. “It’s really not that bad. We go in and do our job and come out. The other unit goes in and does its job and comes out. It’s weird because the game goes by real quick.”

Maybe to Fay and the Pirates but not to their opponents.

Nearly every game this season has been a rout for Ventura (16-0). They have scored 100 or more points eight times and only four opponents finished within 10 points of the Pirates. Ventura has jumped from No. 6 in the preseason state poll to No. 1, the same perch it occupied the past two seasons.

The team, although loaded with freshmen--Fay and returning guard Willie West are the only sophomores--is considered a contender for the state title, something that evaded the Pirates the past two seasons. Ventura lost in the state championship game to Columbia, 97-88, in 1993 and to Long Beach, 63-61, last March. Fay, who played against one of those Ventura teams and practiced with the other, believes this Pirate team can win it all.

“This team is much deeper than those two teams,” Fay said. “We have 10 guys that could start at any other JC. We have so many offensive weapons. (Opponents) never know who is going to be hot or cold.”

At Buena, Fay was usually hot. He averaged 29.2 points his senior season in 1991-92 and was the Southern Section Division I co-player of the year with Santa Ana Mater Dei’s Reggie Geary. Mathews and the Pirates were only a short walk up Telegraph Road but Fay chose Oxnard, where several of his friends were going to play.

“When I recruited him out of high school, I thought he could play but Lance thought he might have a better chance to play at Oxnard,” Mathews said. “I think he felt he could get more minutes there. . . . He knows he doesn’t have the athletic ability of other players, but he makes up for it with his hard-nosed play.”

His freshman season at Oxnard started well. Coach Remy McCarthy had recruited several talented players, including Fay and former Santa Clara High standout forwards Steve Amar and Chris Cole, to blend with top returners Art Wallace and Tony Ziuraitis, and the Condors got off to a good start. They were 16-8 overall and 2-0 in the Western State Conference North Division when things went sour.

The Condors hit a six-game skid. McCarthy, who resigned after the season and is now the interim women’s coach at Moorpark, kicked Amar off the team with three games left to play for questioning the punishment he received for arriving late to a practice. Wallace, a 6-10 center, quit the team the same day because he felt McCarthy treated him unfairly. Oxnard finished 16-14 and 2-6, and Fay, the team’s leading scorer at 16.1 points per game, went to see Mathews.

“I felt I had made a mistake not going to Ventura to start with,” Fay said. “I had no problems with Remy. But all (the problems at Oxnard) made my decision easy.”

Because nonfreshmen enrolling at a junior college must have completed at least 12 units of work at that school before becoming eligible to play sports, Fay redshirted last season and concentrated on academics. He said it wasn’t easy to watch the Pirates cruise to another state tournament without him.

Now Ventura’s opponents are trying to deal with Fay and his teammates. Fay is loving every minute of it.

“There’s a lot more pressure at Ventura, but success breeds success,” Fay said. “I look back at it now and I don’t know what I was thinking when I passed (Ventura) up the first time.”