Road to recovery

The UC Riverside basketball season has started with a grinding 10-day trip that began with a visit and a loss to Bob Knight last week and ends at 14th-ranked Gonzaga on Saturday.

But that is nothing compared to the road this Riverside team already has been down.

Guard Aaron Scott said he has yet to sleep through the night 14 months after the car accident that killed teammate Mark Hall and another student and injured three Riverside players.

“I might wake up two or three times throughout the night, and just lie there before I go back to sleep,” said Scott, who suffered a broken ankle, a broken nose and a broken jaw in the accident and has three metal plates in his face.

He has made it back after sitting out all of last season, and in his first game Saturday against Knight’s Texas Tech team, Scott had 11 points and nine rebounds.

“I don’t look back, I just look forward,” Scott said.

That is what the Riverside basketball program is doing, with the three injured players all back on the court and a new coach, Jim Wooldridge, on the bench.

Former coach David Spencer resigned in March after a season-long medical leave and a dizzying series of setbacks that included his father’s death, the accident, a difficult-to-shake virus and a broken leg in January that has not healed and will require one to three more surgeries.

Enter Wooldridge, a veteran coach with a history of taking over in challenging situations after coaching at Central Missouri State, Texas State, Louisiana Tech and Kansas State.

“It hasn’t been on purpose, at least from my viewpoint, but every job I’ve ever had was starting over,” said Wooldridge, a teammate of USC Coach Tim Floyd as a player at Louisiana Tech and one of Floyd’s assistants when Floyd coached the Chicago Bulls.

“Winning is about talent. But winning and learning how to win it’s a process,” Wooldridge said. “We’ve got the beginnings of a beginning.”

The Highlanders were 7-24 last season and won only one Big West Conference game in the wake of the accident, with assistant Vonn Webb -- who has stayed on under Wooldridge -- handling the team while Spencer was on leave.

The only senior is Larry Cunningham, an athletic guard who led the team in scoring last season at 13.7 points per game but who is trying to corral the streakiness that showed when he scored 34 points against Cal State Fullerton, all in the second half.

A fifth-year senior, Cunningham keenly remembers the death of another Riverside player, Kellen Dixon, who was killed in a car accident in 2003.

“When it happened again, it was something you could never be prepared for,” Cunningham said. “It was devastating. He was a friend. Earlier that day, we were just practicing.”

He looks at Scott and the other players who survived last year’s accident -- forward B.J. Visman, who played five games after the accident before using a redshirt season because of problems with the wrist injury he suffered in the crash, and guard Michael Creppy, who played in 24 games -- and believes he sees a change in them.

“Just a different outlook on life as far as never being promised anything,” Cunningham said. “The next day, everything could be gone. Just their attitude. You may look at something like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ Now you know you could have had a chance not to get to do it. I can see that in them.”

Spencer, their former coach, watches from a distance.

“I’m really, really rooting for them. They’re good kids, and I like Coach Wooldridge,” he said. “I wouldn’t go to a practice or contact the kids. It wouldn’t be right. But I check the scores or try to listen on the radio. It’s a little bit painful, but I certainly can’t keep myself from looking or rooting for them like crazy.”

Spencer was one day from returning from his medical leave in January when he suffered his biggest physical setback, breaking his leg near his hip socket.

“It was just a freak fall, taking the garbage out,” he said. “It was a dry surface, nothing unusual. I’ll never be able to quite accept how it happened.”

Problems with the pins inserted in his leg and a complication known as necrosis will require at least one more surgery, and although Spencer can walk, he said he is on pain medication.

“At times I questioned myself. This has been my whole life. How can I quit on the kids?” Spencer said. “But there is no way I could coach and travel.”

He hopes to return to the bench somewhere, but for now his team is one he never coached. Hall, a community college transfer, had not played for Riverside before the fatal accident Sept. 16, 2006, that also killed Latosha Wallace, another student.

Spencer also thinks about Visman.

“Nobody realizes what a hero he was, dragging a couple of his teammates out of the freeway, and he held Mark in his arms before he passed away. I’m really rooting for him, too.”

Last season, the Riverside team dedicated its season to Hall. This season, it goes unstated.

“That was one of our teammates,” Scott said. “If he was alive, he’d still be playing.”

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robyn.norwood@latimes.com