Five fab for a good reason

UCI’S FAB FIVE

The students who spearheaded the referendum to bring back Anteater Baseball

Bring back UC Irvine baseball!Weeds filled the future site of the Anteater Ballpark, but Scoggin first thought pulling those out from under the ground with his teeth would be easier than having to bend over backward as a senior.

Bring back the grass!

Scoggin didn’t play baseball. He was part of the basketball program, so you’d think he’d ask himself what most students would in their last year.

What am I doing busting my chops for something that wouldn’t help me?

The basketball season was over, but senioritis never hit Scoggin, or four other senior student athletes — Mike Lawrence (golf), Sarah Libecap (volleyball), Kay Nekota (track and field/cross country) and Chris Benitez (swimming/diving) — during their 1998-99 school year.

They’re UCI’s “Fab Five” and they’ll be remembered for more than their athletic feats, from Scoggin coming in as a role player and becoming a captain to Lawrence turning into a Big West Conference Player of the Year to Libecap and Nekota assuming captain roles and Benitez winning a conference crown.

The Fab Five were part of the athletic advisory council that spearheaded the campaign to bring baseball back to UCI after the school dumped the sport in 1992 because of a statewide budget crunch.

Scoggin said they look back proudly at their efforts of putting together a referendum allowing students to vote on whether to rebuild the baseball program, much on their own dime. The five can pat themselves on their backs and the students who voted for baseball. It made it back in 2002 after garnering 62% of the vote, above the 60% required.

Five years later, the Anteaters are reaping the benefits as they’re in the NCAA Division I College World Series for the first time in school history.

Most of the Anteater baseball players don’t know the Fab Five. Heck, most of the five students don’t even know each other anymore. They’ve gone their separate ways. Some are married. A couple of them are in medical school. Most admit they haven’t followed the baseball team closely this year.

But when UCI (45-15-1) opens with Arizona State University (47-13) Saturday at 11 a.m. on ESPN, Lawrence said they’ll be Anteaters. You don’t need the CIA to find them, they’re out there. Just ask right fielder Bryan Petersen. He’s been seeing and hearing the Completely Insane Anteaters throughout UCI’s historic postseason run in which they’ve beat Wake Forest, upset powerhouse Texas twice in the Round Rock Regional in Texas to reach a Super Regional, where they swept Wichita State to get to Omaha.

The baseball program has what Scoggin, Lawrence, Libecap, Nekota and Benitez set out to accomplish as seniors. They remember barking the slogan “Stop Having To Explain Where You Go To School” to students.

Lawrence said an alumnus has a good answer now: “I’ll tell you who we are! We’re the fourth-ranked program and we’re on the biggest stage college baseball has to offer!”

Petersen, a junior, is digging the atmosphere and the support.

“We have that team spirit, that buzz every team wants,” said Petersen after being the first of eight Anteaters drafted in the Major League Baseball Draft, the most in the program’s history. “You can’t beat this.”

That’s not how the Fab Five initially saw the build up to the referendum.

Baseball was the big ticket item on the ballot, but along with it were the addition of two women’s sports, water polo and golf, due to Title IX, the gender equity law. The price tag: a $33 fee hike per quarter for every student.

On a commuter campus, where students are more concerned about beating the traffic than the other team, Lawrence knew sports always took a backseat.

The voting options were fee hikes of $33, $19 and $13, or no, forget it. For baseball to return, the $33 option needed at least 60% with at least 25% of undergraduates voting.

So when Lawrence, now a wealth management and assistant vice president at Merrill Lynch in Dallas, Texas, said then-UCI athletic director Dan Guerrero approached the group about being the driving force behind the referendum, he said he was lost.

“The money, the budget, we didn’t know how much it cost to run an athletic program,” he said, laughing about it now because of his current job. “The athletic department helped out with that because we didn’t have access to the books. They came back with the numbers, and I was the author of the referendum. Well, we all contributed.”

Lawrence was well equipped to relaunch the program, which first came into existence in 1970 and won Division II titles in 1973 and 1974.

Bob Olson, UCI’s sports information director, wanted it back. The day baseball was taken away he called it “the worst day of my career.”

But Lawrence had Scoggin, now a salesman in Orange County, as his pitch man. Sarah and Benitez, who are in medical school at the University of Arizona and UC San Francisco, respectively, examined everything, and Nekota, a teacher in Vacaville, instructed.

The council steered everyone. When there were no games scheduled, UCI still showcased its athletes in uniforms, ready to play the political game on campus. Scoggin will never forget how every athlete had to secure 10 names of students and their numbers so they could call.

“We just picked up the phone and called people we didn’t know and asked them to vote,” said Scoggin, knowing how difficult it was to convince college students to vote during a four-day period, when almost half the country doesn’t participate in a presidential election.

But the turnout of 32% of undergraduates made Libecap proud because it is considered the second highest in school history.

“We were heard,” she said. “It’s rewarding to see the impact the students made.”

There’s a reason Guerrero, now the athletic director at UCLA, dubbed Scoggin, Lawrence, Libecap, Nekota and Benitez the Fab Five.

Guerrero can now laugh about his first press conference as UCI’s athletic director in 1992, when he said a reporter asked him if he could bring baseball back. The former baseball player at UCLA found the group in time to help him before leaving UCI for his alma mater in 2002. Three months after UCI’s first home game in 10 years, Guerrero was hired at UCLA.

“They were committed and they worked well together and collaborated with the student athletes and students like no other student-athlete group I’ve ever seen,” said Guerrero of the six-week campaign the Fab Five ran. “I can say getting baseball back at UCI is the greatest single accomplishment in my career in intercollegiate athletics.

“I’m very proud and when we brought baseball back the intention was to ultimately win a national championship. I’ll be following UCI.”

DAVID CARRILLO PEÑALOZA may be reached at (714) 966-4612 or at david.carrillo@latimes.com.

A grassroots effort is what Brian Scoggin called it in 1999.