They Hope This Trip Will End in Sydney

Jennifer Brundage would rather be nowhere else in the world than in the lobby of a hotel here on a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon. As a member of the team the American Softball Assn. hopes will represent the United States at the 2000 Olympics, Brundage has been spending many mornings in hotel lobbies all summer.

This national team has been barnstorming the country, playing Women’s Professional Softball League teams, college all-star teams, playing anybody it can play and spreading the word about U.S. women’s softball. That it is big, it is bad, it will crush the ball and crush the opposition’s hopes. And Brundage is loving every early morning wake-up call, every bad fast-food meal, every autograph request, every single thing that comes with being a potential U.S. Olympian.

Brundage, 27, hoped, believed, even expected to be on the 1996 U.S. Olympic softball team.

After all, she had been named Southern Section player of the year in 1991 after leading Irvine High to a championship. In 1995, while playing for UCLA, Brundage was the Honda Award winner, which meant she was considered the best college player in the country. The Bruins also won the NCAA title that year and for Brundage, what would seem to naturally come next was the Olympics.

Of course.

“I got named as an alternate, but I was disappointed,” Brundage says.

It is a couple of hours before the U.S. team will play WPSL’s Akron Racers at Husky Stadium. Brundage looks a little sleepy, a little lost in the lobby. This tour is a grind, a mixture of plane trips and bus trips, of promotional appearances, charity clinics, practices and games.

This “Central Park to Sydney Tour” began June 2 in Chattanooga, Tenn., and will end Sept. 3 in Honolulu. There have been only four off-days so far, with only four more to come.

There has been turmoil and uncertainty. Julie Smith, a 1996 Olympian, filed for arbitration after being left off the Olympic team, which was named last September, and no resolution has come yet. The 15 women on the team wonder if they will eventually travel to Australia, or not.

Brundage, a soft-spoken third baseman, doesn’t allow herself to think about not staying on this team. She can hardly allow herself to believe she is actually on it.

After she traveled all summer with the 1996 Olympic team--the alternates get to stay with the team up until the Olympics--Brundage found it both joyful and painful to watch the U.S. win softball’s first Olympic gold medal.

“I was so happy for all my friends on the team,” Brundage says, “but it was so hard to have been part of everything up until Atlanta and then to be able to only watch from the stands. I wanted so much to be on the field with them.”

Determined to be one of the celebrants on the field in 2000, Brundage took a nonpaying job as a volunteer assistant coach at UCLA and worked out with national team stars like Lisa Fernandez. Brundage’s life was in limbo. She could have accepted a paying assistant coaching job somewhere, but then she wouldn’t have had the time to keep playing at a national-team level.

If Brundage had been disappointed in 1996, she was devastated in 1998. Having postponed her coaching career, having postponed her life, she was left off the 1998 U.S. World Championship team.

“That was a major blow,” Brundage says. “I thought I had a great tryout. I understood I had to be patient in 1996, but I didn’t understand this.”

Shirley Topley, the national team’s assistant coach, says “Jennifer truly believed she belonged on that 1998 team.

“And Jennifer probably did belong on that team,” said Topley, who is from Anaheim and has coached and watched a lot of national teams. “She had a right to feel bad and she could have just given up. But to her credit, Jennifer just went home and worked even harder.”

Says Brundage: “I thought about quitting. Of course I was discouraged. But when I thought about not playing, I realized that I just had too much fun with the game. I wanted to be on third base with the best players in the world.”

Still, Brundage needed to make a living. Last year, she was offered a job as an assistant coach at Michigan. “It was scary, to leave California,” Brundage says, “but it was too good an offer to turn down. But, boy, I wasn’t looking forward to my first Ann Arbor winter.”

Brundage, who played with the national team while coaching the Wolverines, has been steady on the current summer tour. She has started all 30 games so far and is batting .325. Sometimes she stops and thinks about what it will be like walking into the Olympic Stadium in Sydney for the opening ceremonies.

“I get chills,” Brundage says. “I don’t think I can even imagine all the emotions I’m going to have.”

Perseverance has paid off. It’s what Brundage would tell anyone now. Never give up.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com