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Title: Tales from the Small Time

A Celebration of Small College Athletics

Author: Jim Moore

Price: $14.95

While the author had a habit of waxing poetically in his weekly writings during five seasons as sports information director at Chapman University, his first book provides intriguing insights into small college athletics and how they hum along in a virtual vacuum.

“Small college athletes and coaches enjoy and embrace the same challenges, thrills and moments of truth that are inherent in athletic competition at any level,” Moore writes. “It’s a world that is seldom seen by the majority of people who follow sports.”

A native of Oregon, Moore knew little about college athletics, or journalism for that matter, when he had a chance encounter on an airplane in the early 1990s with Panther women’s basketball Coach Mary Hegarty.

Eventually, Moore quit a boring job in environmental sciences, loaded up his car and headed South from Eugene to become Hegarty’s volunteer assistant coach. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do to pay the bills, but he parlayed the fact that his father had been a small-town newspaper publisher into a job writing weekly press releases for Chapman.

Some of the people he mused about in weekly ramblings included former Chapman bench-warmer and current UCLA basketball Coach Steve Lavin, former Polish Olympian and current Chapman track and field Coach Anna Wlodarczyk and former Long Beach State and Cincinnati football Coach Dave Curry, now Chapman’s athletic director.

Week after week, though, most of those tales landed at the bottom of local reporters’ trash bins, and Moore quit a year ago to become president of his own Corvallis, Ore., publishing business.

It’s worth noting here that for every UCLA, USC or Cal State Fullerton, there are three times the number of small colleges in Southern California with viable athletic programs. Moore chides the establishment for relegating them to the back burner.

“At some point way back in the development curve of college athletics there was a fork in the road,” he writes.