His Watch Over, Klitsner Now Sees Baseball as Thief of Time

Now that he’s on the other side of the fence John Klitsner is looking at baseball a little differently.

Klitsner, who resigned as the Mission College coach after last season to focus on his job as the school’s athletic director, recently watched the Free Spirit play under Coach Ryan Cooper.

It was a much different perspective.

“I had been going to our soccer games in the fall and those were great because you have a clock,” Klitsner said. “I looked at my watch and we had played seven innings in three hours. I kept saying [to the pitcher], ‘Quit throwing to first base.’ ”

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The intimidator: After the Royal High boys’ soccer team recently routed a Marmonte League rival, Coach Kevin Corley still was chuckling over the pregame display put on by erstwhile forward Levi Line.

A standout football lineman who joined the soccer team in January as a backup goalie, Line was stretching with his teammates when the opposing players walked across the field to their bench.

Corley sent Line, 6 feet 2 and 240 pounds, to one of the goals and told him to take a shot so the opponents would be sure to notice him.

Line added to the histrionics by first flexing his massive upper body, then he drilled a precise shot into an upper corner of the net.

“The [opposing] players’ mouths just dropped,” said Corley, who played Line in the second half to the cheers of a raucous home crowd. “I told Levi, ‘Good choice on not taking any more shots because there’s no way you would have made another one like that.’ ”

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A laugh a minute: Nancy Vincent, the senior center on the Chatsworth High girls’ basketball team, uses the word “fun” extensively in describing her experiences this season with the Chancellors, the second-seeded team in the City Section 3-A Division playoffs.

“If I had to pick one word, it would have to be fun,” said Vincent, who wasn’t sure she would be able to play after suffering a knee injury in a pickup game in the fall. “We have a good time in practices and in games. It’s been fun the entire time.”

The team proved her point moments later when Coach Emad Whitney had to ask several players to keep it down because they were laughing too hard during a shooting drill.

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Easy choice: Believe it or not, Michael Abraham says he’d rather coach a women’s basketball team like Cal State Northridge, which celebrated a two-game winning streak last week, than one of the teams he helped coach at Long Beach State, which consistently dominated the Big West.

It seems Abraham and his colleagues had trouble keeping the Long Beach players interested while they pieced together a record of 147-21, 88-3 in conference play, over six seasons.

At least the challenges never end at Northridge.

“I would rather have a team that has to keep fighting than one that you have to worry about keeping motivated all the time,” Abraham said.

Stats

Senior point guard Nicole Albert, who leads the Cal Lutheran women’s basketball team in assists (421) and steals (419) in a career, scored 15 points Tuesday in a 70-55 loss to La Verne and moved into second place on the school’s scoring list. Albert, who has 1,232 points, trails Kim Peppi (1,523 points from 1984-87) on the all-time Regal list.

Forward Donald Patterson set a scoring record at Grant High in his final high school game last week. With 938 points as a three-year stater, Patterson broke Dave Bernard’s mark of 936 set in 1982.

Quotebook

“I don’t know if it’s the Matadome, but we seem to suck the good volleyball out of great teams when we play here.”

-- Cal State Northridge volleyball Coach John Price, after the sixth-ranked Matadors upset No. 3 UC Santa Barbara on Tuesday.

Things to Do

Former Cal Lutheran baseball Coach Rich Hill brings his undefeated University of San Francisco team to Cal State Northridge to face the once-beaten Matadors in a three-game series beginning Saturday at 1 p.m.

Neither team will reveal its precise pitching plans but former Notre Dame High left-hander Rich Igou (3-0) and former Pierce College and Agoura High right-hander Jason Warren (1-0) probably will start for USF (7-0) on Saturday and Sunday.

The Northridge starters will be left-hander Erasmo Ramirez (2-0), Robert Crabtree (4-0) and right-hander Jason Cole (1-0), but Coach Mike Batesole is uncertain of their order in the rotation.

The Saturday and Sunday games begin at 1 p.m. Monday’s game starts at 2.

* Contributing: Fernando Dominguez, Jeff Fletcher, Irene Garcia, Steve Henson, Mike Lazarus, Paige A. Leech, John Ortega, Tris Wykes.