She Has No Patience for a Slow Recovery

Leticia Oseguera played a lot, then grumbled a little. She finished with 10 points and eight rebounds against Portland State on Dec. 15, and UC Irvine had lost, 51-43. She hated that night. Absolutely hated it.

Oseguera, a 5-foot-11 senior, called a team meeting and apologized for her play. She continued to apologize later to her teammate and roommate, Chelsea Mackey. Everyone was surprised by Oseguera’s reaction, yet they understood.

They knew she hadn’t played in a month because of a broken bone in her left hand. They knew it was going to take time for her to return to the form that made her the team’s leading scorer and rebounder last season. They also knew there was no way she was going to accept that performance because they knew Oseguera.

“She kept telling me that she let us down,” Mackey said. “She was mad because she didn’t play like she expects to play. I tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault, we all did, but we know how she can be.”

Perfect, usually.

Coming from a family of seven children certainly gave Oseguera an overly developed drive to achieve, which she has honed over the years. It’s hard to argue with the results.

This is a person who never played basketball until her sophomore year at Mater Dei. Yet, by the end of her first season, she was the best player on the Monarchs’ junior varsity team. By the end of her senior season, she was a second-team all-county selection.

This is also a person who wrings her hands over every exam, sweats out every paper. Yet she has accumulated enough academic honors to stand out.

“Since you are always excelling and achieving, that’s where your standard is set up,” said Oseguera, a sociology major. “When I fall below that, people are like, ‘Oh my gosh, what happened?’ Since my standards are always high, when I start to dip, it has an effect on me.”

She can come off as being a bit obsessive, but it works for her. As trite as the term “student/athlete” seems to have become, Oseguera truly fits that description.

She’s a three-time Big West Conference scholar-athlete. She was an Arthur Ashe Sports Scholar Award winner last spring. She has participated with other UCI students in the Hewlett Fellowship, which was set up to create more interaction on campus. She was named to the NCAA Leadership Foundation, which brought athletes together to seek to improve the college athletic experience.

Such an academic resume for an athlete usually spells scrubeenie. Yet, Oseguera’s contribution to the team goes way beyond sitting at the end of the bench and clapping when the Anteaters score.

She was a first-team All-Big West Conference pick last season after averaging 17.4 points and 9.9 rebounds in helping the Anteaters reach the conference title game. She was a second-team all-conference selection as a sophomore. As a freshman, she played a key reserve role when the Anteaters won the conference tournament title.

“A couple years ago, we didn’t speak for about a half a season because I yelled at her in practice,” said Irvine Coach Mark Adams, who was an Anteater assistant before this season. “I think one of the reasons it hurt her was that she doesn’t get yelled at very much because she does so many things right.

“I think there are days where she gets a little bored with what we do in practice. She likes to be so perfect and needs to be stimulated so much. She stays hungry to do well and better herself. She told me that’s because she’s from a big family. She told me it made her hungry.”

The only docile place in the Oseguera house when she was growing up was the dinner table, where her father, Raul, ruled.

“Her kept us in line at the table,” Oseguera said. “We were all disciplined there. That’s probably where I learned to be disciplined in school and in sports.”

The rest she leaned before and after dinner.

Growing up the second youngest in a large family can be a matter of survival. But Oseguera thrived.

“It was always loud around our house,” she said. “We played everything with our brothers. Kick ball, dodge ball, tag, everything was physical and rough.”

Tag? Rough?

“If you sat back in our family, you were going to get run over,” Oseguera said. “Dodge ball was brutal stuff. We got it harder because we were girls. It helped me. I’m not real wimpy. If I could play with my brothers and their friends, I can play with any woman athlete out there.”

Said Adams: “She’s a perfectionist in her own little way, athletically and academically.”

Which is what made her performance against Portland State so difficult for Oseguera.

She had 18 points and 16 rebounds in an exhibition game against Kilsyth (Australia) on Nov. 16. In that game she and another player fell, and Oseguera landed on her left hand. She was expected to be out four to six weeks, but rushed back and was practicing in three.

So no one was upset--or even surprised--when Oseguera made only four of 15 shots against Portland State. Except Oseguera, that is.

“I didn’t expect to score 50 points and grab 30 rebounds, but I wanted to do the little things right,” she said. “That was the frustrating part.

“As an athlete, you just want to get back into it. You feel that nothing is going to stop you. Since I loved the game so much, I loved being out there so much, I felt nothing was going to stop me. When it did, it was tough to accept.”