WORLD SPORTS SCENE : USOC and NCAA Cooperation Would Benefit Both

There is no question that the United States has the world’s best training facilities for athletes. But they have been off limits to potential Olympians in many sports because most of the facilities are on college campuses.

As a result, the U.S. Olympic Committee helped build and subsidize its own multi-sport training centers in Colorado Springs, Colo., Lake Placid, N.Y., and San Diego. They are excellent, but not convenient to many athletes.

But after a decades-long feud between the USOC and the NCAA, the organizations have determined that each will benefit if they work together. They came to this conclusion a few years ago, when Dick Schultz was executive director of the NCAA. Now that he has that same title at the USOC, he has continued to pursue a partnership. A plan, he said last week, might be in place by next fall.

If it works as a joint USOC-NCAA task force envisions, it would solve problems for both bodies.

For the NCAA, its member schools would receive financial support from the USOC so that they could continue to field teams in Olympic sports, such as gymnastics and water polo, that they are now cutting, or to add new sports. Because some of those sports would be for women, that could also help schools comply with the federal law that requires equal opportunities in athletics for men and women.

For the USOC, there would eventually be a larger talent pool from which to choose teams for the Olympics and the Pan American Games.

Schultz said last week that plans he has studied that would accomplish those goals would cost the USOC at least $10 million a year, which might be considered too expensive. But the good news is that the USOC and NCAA are addressing the issue, and, at the very least, probably will reach an agreement that would allow Olympic athletes to take advantage of the facilities on college campuses even if they are not students.

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Although Los Angeles’ annual indoor track and field meet, scheduled for Feb. 24 next year, has been saved by the L.A. Sports & Entertainment Commission and the Sports Arena, promoter Al Franken is still searching for a title sponsor.

Last week, he suggested Jonathan Ogden. It might seem unusual for one of the meet’s competitors to pay six figures to sponsor it, but the UCLA shot-putter probably could afford it. Also a tackle for UCLA’s football team, he is expected to be one of the first five players selected in the NFL draft.

Of course, Ogden probably will pass if he is no more extravagant than one of his former teammates on the UCLA track team, John Godina.

One of his rewards for winning the world championship in the shotput competition this year was a new Mercedes. But after driving the luxury car around Los Angeles for a couple of months, Godina asked his father to come out and drive it home to Wyoming.

“I didn’t feel comfortable in it,” Godina said. “It’s a little too nice. You’ve got to go spartan if you want to do well.”

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Less than a month before the national championships in San Jose, defending women’s figure skating champion Nicole Bobek has left her eighth coach, the man who was credited for her success this year, and returned to her second coach.

Richard Callaghan, who coached Bobek for 15 months in Detroit, told the Chicago Tribune: “Strange things have happened in this sport, and they will continue to happen. I’m not shocked. If Nicole wants things to work, she will make them work.”

It is the ninth coaching change in nine years for Bobek, 18, of Chicago, who finished third in the world in 1995. She is now training under Barbara Roles Williams, who coached Bobek for two years at Harbor City when she was between the ages of 10 and 12. It has not been determined whether Bobek will work with Williams at the rink the coach uses in Torrance or Las Vegas.

In a statement, Bobek said: “Barbara is someone I have trained well with in the past, someone I believe can take me to the next level.”

World Scene Notes

For the first time, the U.S. water polo team has a permanent training site after USA Water Polo raised $450,000 to renovate the pool at the Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center. Construction on the 50-meter pool will begin Jan. 2. For years, the team alternated between high school pools in northern and southern California but lately has been practicing at the Belmont Olympic Plaza pool in Long Beach. . . . The U.S. men will play defending Olympic champion Italy next Saturday at 3 p.m. at Corona del Mar High and on Jan. 3 at 7 p.m. at the Belmont pool.

So many businessmen in her hometown of Memphis, Tenn., told her to contact them if she needed anything, Rochelle Stevens, sixth in track and field’s 400 meters in the 1992 Summer Olympics at Barcelona, took them up on it. She arranged her own fund-raising luncheon, leaving with $22,500 and two round-trip, first-class airline tickets to her training base in Florida. “They said they were my friends, so they had to take my call,” she said. “Then I hit them with the hammer.”

Guard Dawn Staley, who sat out six weeks with the U.S. women’s basketball team after undergoing knee surgery, is now out for three to four weeks because of a broken bone in her right hand. . . . The only country of 197 invited to the 1996 Summer Olympics that has not responded is North Korea, but former president Jimmy Carter has intervened and is optimistic that there will be a perfect attendance record for Atlanta.

Times staff writers Elliott Almond and Maryann Hudson contributed to this story.