‘Eating them up

The baseball team is ranked No. 1 in the nation.

Likewise, the men’s volleyball team.

And, in what might come as a surprise to many local sports fans, the school with bragging rights to both is neither USC nor UCLA.

Far removed from the Coliseum and Pauley Pavilion, UC Irvine is enjoying a spring to remember.

A few weeks ago, the Anteaters vaulted to the top of the Baseball America and Collegiate Baseball polls, the first time the once-dead program was ranked No. 1 in Division I.Not that the players were overly impressed.

“It was pretty cool,” shortstop Ben Orloff said. “But I was thinking, ‘We want to be ranked No. 1 eight weeks from now.’ ”

That would be in June, when Irvine hopes to reach the College World Series for the second time in three years and win its first Division I baseball title.

Meantime, the volleyball team has a more immediate concern.

The Anteaters (25-5) are in Provo, Utah, where they play Ohio State on Thursday in an NCAA tournament semifinal. Penn State plays USC in the other semifinal.

Irvine, the 2007 national champion, lost to USC in a semifinal of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation tournament last week, but the NCAA selection committee awarded the Anteaters an at-large berth and top seeding in the Final Four.

“We were just stoked,” outside hitter Taylor Wilson said. “A lot of us feel like we’re going back to where we belong.”

Irvine’s growing national profile could alter the local sports landscape, which is dominated in football by USC and in college basketball by UCLA.

Irvine has already become a power in the spring -- with designs on heightening its profile in all sports.

Since Athletic Director Mike Izzi arrived on campus early last year after 16 years in Stanford’s athletic department, he says his “mission” has been to make Anteaters athletics the equal of Irvine’s highly regarded academic environment.

“People are starting to expect us to be good, as opposed to, ‘You’re just another Division I team that people don’t pay attention to,’ ” Izzi said. “My job is going to be, ‘How do I build the facilities to match the excellence of athletics we have at UCI?’ If we do that, people are going to look at us a lot differently.”

Irvine’s volleyball program began forging a high-profile identity after John Speraw was hired as coach seven years ago.

In his first season, the former UCLA middle blocker and Bruins assistant guided the Anteaters to a 10-0 start, a brief No. 1 ranking and a school-record 20 victories.

“It showed there was some potential here,” said Speraw, an assistant coach for the gold-medal winning 2008 U.S. Olympic team.

Irvine advanced to the Final Four for the first time in 2006 and won the title the next season.

Wilson, a fifth-year senior from Mission Viejo, has been a part of the transformation into a perennial contender.

“It used to be people would kind of forget about us and we could sneak up on them,” he said. “Now that we’ve been to the Final Four a few times, they know UCI is a powerhouse.”

The Anteaters baseball program has enjoyed a steady climb to similar stature, a remarkable journey considering the program was dropped in 1992 because of a statewide budget crunch and is on its third coach since its rebirth.

“It’s been a trickle-down right from the beginning,” Coach Mike Gillespie said, explaining the success.

It started when former athletic director Dan Guerrero made it a priority to restart the program. Irvine students passed a referendum that led to its comeback for the 2002 season.

John Savage was hired as coach, and the former USC assistant guided the Anteaters to the playoffs in 2004 before following Guerrero to UCLA.

Dave Serrano succeeded Savage, the former Cal State Fullerton assistant leading Irvine to the playoffs in 2006 and its first Division I World Series appearance in 2007.

Serrano then agonized before accepting an offer to return to head the Fullerton program.

That left Irvine without a steward for a team coming off the best season in its history.

The school’s search committee turned to Gillespie, who led USC to 15 NCAA tournament berths, four College World Series appearances and the 1998 national championship before he was fired in 2006 after 20 seasons.

“We got lucky,” Orloff said.

Gillespie also feels fortunate.

“The discipline in the program, the unselfishness -- we walked into that,” the 68-year-old coach said. “And we have good players.”

But not elite pro prospects.

The Anteaters, 34-11 overall, enter this weekend’s series at Pacific with a 14-1 record in the Big West Conference but without a player projected as a first-round pick in next month’s Major League Baseball draft.

“We have lot of guys with good makeup -- grinders that work hard,” said Orloff, who is batting .350. “We’re guys that might have been overlooked by some places.”

The players’ collective humility, Gillespie believes, will keep the Anteaters from reading too much into their perch atop two polls.

“They seem to be pretty mindful of who they are, so they don’t think they’re too cool for school,” Gillespie said. “They know we have a playoff in this sport. It’s not like [the NCAA selection committee] is going to put us into the BCS final game because we’re ranked No. 1.”

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gary.klein@latimes.com