UCLA Opponent Has International Flair

The opponents’ uniform jerseys have “George Washington” across the front, but the UCLA women’s basketball team may at times think they’re playing an international all-star team at Notre Dame tonight.

UCLA senior All-American Maylana Martin, for one, will see a familiar face in its first-round NCAA tournament game in the Mideast Regional.

In July 1997, at Natal, Brazil, a United States team played Slovakia in the semifinals of the world junior championships.

Martin, who had just finished her freshman season at UCLA, was matched up with a 6-foot-3 swing player named Petra Dubovcova. On that day, both Martin and Team USA prevailed, 90-77, with Martin scoring 20, Dubovcova 10.

Three years later, Martin and her UCLA teammates, 18-10 and the fourth-place finisher in the Pacific 10 Conference, need to beat Dubovcova--one of the Colonials’ three foreign players--and her George Washington teammates, 25-5 and champions in the Atlantic 10’s regular season, to reach the second round Sunday. A victory will get the Bruins the winner of tonight’s Notre Dame-San Diego game.

UCLA is much bigger than George Washington, but that didn’t seem to bother the Colonials when they played Rutgers. George Washington beat the bigger Scarlet Knights in December, 63-58, two weeks before Rutgers routed UCLA, 70-49.

The Bruins had a disastrous second half to their Pac-10 season, finishing 6-6 down the stretch, but did manage to finish with an upbeat sweep of the Washington schools. George Washington finished with a loss, 80-66 to Xavier in the Atlantic 10 tournament title game, after having won the previous five.

George Washington tied Xavier and St. Joseph’s at 14-2 in the regular season race but won the championship on tiebreakers. In one stretch, the Colonials won 12 straight games and 18 of 19.

Two of their European players are on national teams. Dubovcova, a junior, can play at the Sydney Olympics if she chooses to skip next fall’s semester at George Washington. Elisa Aguilar, a 5-8 senior, is on Spain’s national team, but Spain is not an Olympic qualifier.

The other European is Katarina Baskova, a 6-foot junior from Slovakia.

Coach Joe McKeown uses nonstop substitutions, with 10 players averaging double-digit minutes. The Colonials play a high-pressure defensive game, and a major contributor is 5-6 guard Krisleena Alexander, named the Atlantic 10’s “sixth player of the year.”

Alexander, a junior, played in the famed Christ the King High program in New York, with Connecticut’s Sue Bird and WNBA star Chamique Holdsclaw.

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The balance of power in women’s basketball on the West Coast was supposed to be shifting south, from Stanford to UCLA. It stopped about 100 miles short, at scenic UC Santa Barbara.

The fourth-seeded Gauchos enter the NCAA tournament having won 26 games in a row--longest active winning streak of any Division I school, men’s or women’s.

“It’s been an unbelievable year,” Coach Mark French said. “But one of the things we talked about when we began this season was in order to keep our program going upward, we needed to go deeper in the NCAA tournament.

“The first goal was to host the first and second rounds; last year’s hosts all advanced to the Sweet 16. We’ve achieved that goal. Now, we’ll see what happens.”

The Gauchos (30-3), the nation’s fourth-highest scoring team with an 81.6-point average, face 13th-seeded Rice (21-9) Saturday night, after fifth-seeded North Carolina (18-12) meets 12th-seeded Maine (20-10). The winners meet Monday night.

The games will be played before sellout crowds of nearly 6,000 at the Thunderdome on campus.

“It’s going to be nuts,” French said. “Win, lose or draw, the environment around here has been great for women’s college basketball. Other coaches of big-time programs have said, ‘Wow, it’s electric in there.’ ”

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Pepperdine (21-9), winner of 11 of its last 12 games, will open tournament play today against fourth-seeded Virginia (23-8) as the 13th-seeded team in the Mideast Regional at Charlottesville, Va.

It is the first meeting between the schools.

Rasheeda Clark, the West Coast Conference’s player of the year, leads the Waves in scoring (15.5), assists (3.5) and steals (1.8). Virginia forward Schuye LaRue, the Atlantic Coast Conference’s freshman of the year, has a 14.6 scoring average for the Cavaliers, who earned a berth in the NCAA tournament for the 17th consecutive year.

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Times News Services contributed to this story.