Bruins Try to Continue Domination in Softball : Colleges: Three-time defending NCAA champions have plenty of pitching and hitting talent.

Language purists who shuddered when the term, three-peat , was coined may have to brace themselves for an even more grating neologism if Coach Sharron Backus and her UCLA women’s softball get into the NCAA playoffs this year.

The Bruins have won three consecutive NCAA championships under Backus, and there is a strong possibility that they could four-peat .

Since women’s softball became an NCAA sport in 1982, UCLA has won six of the nine national championships. The only other teams to win an NCAA title were Texas A & M in 1983 and 1987 and Cal State Fullerton in 1986.

Backus and co-coach Sue Enquist have only two holes to fill in this year’s lineup. The regulars who completed their eligibility last year were three-time All-American pitcher Lisa Longaker and All-Pacific 10 Conference outfielder Shelly Montgomery.

Longaker is the biggest loss. She holds six school records and twice won the Honda-Broderick Award, given to the nation’s best college softball player.

But UCLA has plenty of talent remaining, and the veteran pitchers are all sophomores.

The sophomores, who each had strong years on the mound as freshmen, are Heather Compton, Deanna Denise (DeDe) Weiman and Lisa Fernandez, who plays third base when she isn’t pitching.

Compton, whose sister Tracy was a standout pitcher on three NCAA championship teams at UCLA, had an 18-1 record last year and pitched a one-hitter in last year’s NCAA final, a 2-0 victory over Fresno State. She pitched 62 consecutive innings without allowing a run.

Weiman tied a school record with three no-hit games last year, pitched 33 scoreless innings in a row and finished 13-3. Fernandez batted .310, was 11-1 with a team-low earned-run average of 0.25, pitched 49 consecutive innings without giving up a run and was named a first-team All-American.

UCLA opened the season last week by sweeping a doubleheader from UC Santa Barbara, 5-0 and 2-0. In the first game, Compton threw a three-hitter and had 12 strikeouts, tying a career-high mark. In the second, Fernandez was pitching a perfect game with two outs in the seventh inning when Andrea Serrano got an infield single. Fernandez struck out the next batter to end the game.

Freshmen Jennifer Caporale and Nichole Victoria can also pitch, but this year they will mostly play elsewhere. Caporale, a Tucson resident who was the 1990 Southern Arizona prep player of the year, will be used mainly as a pinch-runner or hitter. Victoria, twice an All-CIF Southern Section player at Camarillo High, can play the infield or outfield.

The outfield includes junior All-Americans Yvonne Gutierrez, who hit a team-high .384 last year, and Lorraine Maynez, who took last year off to concentrate on her studies but hit a team-high .388 in 1988.

The infield, in addition to third baseman Fernandez, includes first baseman-third baseman Kerry Dienelt, a senior from Australia who was named to College World Series all-star teams three times; two-time All-Pac-10 second baseman Missy Phillips and All-Pac-10 shortstop Kristy Howard, a sophomore.

So UCLA is loaded again, but that’s no assurance that the team will win a fourth consecutive national championship, according to Backus.

“My big question this year is, ‘How hungry is this team?’ ” she said. “It has experience and talent, but you never know how the cake is going to turn out. There are too many intangibles, which we’ll analyze and deal with as they come up.”

She said that the competition has improved in the Pac-10 and elsewhere in the West. Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach will be tough, and Arizona “is going to be very strong,” she said.

Still, the Bruins are the team to beat.

Last year’s team finished with a 62-7 record, and Backus has a career record of 549-120-3 as she begins her 16th year at UCLA.

Her 1978 team also won a national championship before softball became an NCAA sport, when the team played in the Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. Co-Coach Enquist starred on the 1978 team, hit a school-record .401 in her final season in 1979 and has been with Backus and UCLA as a coach ever since.

Backus, a Cal State Fullerton graduate, was also a winner as a top Amateur Softball Assn. shortstop and third baseman. She played on seven teams that won national ASA titles and two that won international crowns. In 1985, she was inducted into the ASA Hall of Fame.

UCLA had a women’s softball program before Backus came in 1975, but it didn’t have The Women’s Softball Program. Still, it hasn’t been easy for Backus.

Judith Holland, UCLA senior associate athletic director, hired Backus to be a part-time coach while she was still teaching and coaching at Western High in Anaheim.

Holland said that for the first couple of years Backus remained a teacher at Western High and drove from Orange County to Westwood every day to coach the Bruins.

Backus said that to hold down the two jobs, she taught physical education classes at Western that began at 5:45 a.m., classes for students who had afternoon jobs. With no afternoon classes to teach, she was able to make the long drive to UCLA for practices and games.

Holland said that she thinks she paid Backus about $1,500 a year to be a part-time coach, “and I don’t think the money even paid for her gas.”

She said she knew Backus as a player and a coach and that she was her first choice to coach the UCLA team.

“I had seen her play, and she was probably one of the best shortstops who ever played the game,” Holland said.

“I knew she would have a tough time getting going; she didn’t have a lot of pitching and pitching is the name of the game. I knew it took time to build a program, but I just stuck with her in the early years, and, bless her little soul, she stuck with it.

“She made me look like a genius, like I knew what I was doing.”

Not everything is hunky-dory with UCLA women’s softball. Backus said she would like it if the university could pay higher salaries to Enquist and assistant Kirk Walker, in his eighth year at UCLA. She said that both coaches have been invaluable to the team’s success.

One way of assuring more money for the program is to form a boosters’ club for UCLA softball. Backus and her fellow coaches are in the midst of doing that very thing.

Another potential way of bringing in more money for softball would be to have lights and night games at UCLA’s softball diamond in Sunset Canyon on campus. But the field is across the street from Bel-Air, and residents there would probably not welcome night softball, especially since the Bel-Air Assn. donated the land for the diamond, Backus said.

She said that the field’s bleachers will hold up to 400 now and that sometimes the program will charge spectators $2 each to see games against top teams such as Fullerton or Fresno State. But the Bruins don’t play enough of those games and don’t have the seating capacity to make softball a revenue sport.

With more seats and a lighted field, softball “could be a revenue sport,” Backus said. “It would be no problem.”

The problem is that UCLA has no land available on campus for a new field with more bleachers and lights. Backus and Holland said that the UCLA administration has had preliminary discussions with the Veterans Administration in West Los Angeles about using land at the VA for a softball field. The Bruin baseball field, Jackie Robinson Stadium, is located at the VA.

The discussions are “sort of in abeyance now,” Holland said, and “it’s not going to happen this year or next year--but who knows?”