UC IRVINE NOTEBOOK / JOHN WEYLER : Fritschi Fits Right In With Anteaters

Antje Fritschi loves Southern California. She came here from Germany two years ago and was the State singles tennis champion at Grossmont College last season. She loves the weather, the beaches, the tennis, everything except maybe the freeways. But none of that prepared her for her welcome to UC Irvine.

Fritschi returned from her home in Feiberg a few days before school started, rented an apartment and got a roommate, through the advertising on campus, to share expenses. She had scarcely met her new companion, however, when she returned home from a tennis workout to find yet another roomie, a rat.

“I came in from practice and this thing was running around the living room. I was totally freaking out,” she said, showing fine command of her Southland English. “So I jumped up on a table. I don’t handle rats too well.

“When I told my dad, he said, ‘Why didn’t you scoop it up with the tennis racket and put it back in the cage?’ But I was so scared, I couldn’t even get that close.”

Fritschi had a little talk with her roommate about her pet’s house privileges, but it took one more incident before it was permanently confined to its cage.

“Another time she let it out and she couldn’t find it,” Fritschi said. “We found it on my bed. Eeaagh.”

The rat is fortunate Fritschi is so frightened of rodents. It’s unlikely it would have survived one of her forehands. Few two-legged opponents do. Fritschi signed on with the Anteaters and immediately became their No. 1 singles player.

“Antje has a powerful game and a very aggressive style,” Coach Doreen Irish said. “She likes to get to the net and win the point.”

Fritschi’s tennis career began when she was 6 and her parents took up the sport. She played on club teams until she was 15, when she decided she would become a “regular teen-ager” and chase boys instead of tennis balls.

“It was the age,” she says. “I just wanted to be with my friends and have fun.”

It was about that time that Fritschi made her first trip to California, and she knew then she would be back. After graduating from high school in Germany, she took a month-long course to polish her English in preparation for college in the United States.

“I met some people there who were going to Grossmont, so I went, too,” she said. “But at that time, I hadn’t even thought about playing tennis. My friends kept saying, ‘Why don’t you try out for the team?’ So I finally decided to try.

“I had been four or five years without any training, just playing for fun on weekends, so it was very hard, both physically and mentally, to play in tournaments again. The first couple didn’t go very well, either.”

But Fritschi, who grew up playing long rallies on clay courts, quickly adjusted to the fast lane of the Southland’s hard courts and developed a strong serve-and-volley style.

“After about half a year, I got it back and the rest of my time at Grossmont was really, really fun,” she said.

And there’s little chance of Jennifer Capriati Syndrome here. Fritschi’s burning with enthusiasm, not burning out.

“If I had continued playing, I might have been saying, ‘Enough tennis,’ by now,” she said, “but I had so much fun at Grossmont, I’m really excited now that the season has started here.”

Fritschi is 1-1 this season--she lost to UCLA’s Keri Phebus Friday--but life is good. She enjoys her classes, the weather outside is anything but frightful and, best of all, the rat is back in the cage.

“I could easily imagine living here,” she said, “but all my family is back home. Now I can go back in the summer and for a month in the winter, but if I went to work, it would be harder.

“So I don’t know. When people ask, I just say I’m keeping my options open.”

Sounds like a totally laid-back, California attitude, dude.

*

Spin doctor: Rod Baker seems at peace with the world these days, and that’s a bit unusual for a basketball coach who has lost four in a row and seven of the last eight.

The Anteaters (5-11, 2-6 in the Big West) have lost back-to-back overtime games despite aggressive and intense efforts.

“It’s a lot easier to put a positive spin on things when you play well and things just don’t work out,” Baker said. “We didn’t play well after the first five minutes against (Nevada) Las Vegas and we didn’t play well against San Jose State. Every other (conference) game was winable.”

Two of Irvine’s last seven defeats were two-point margins and two went into overtime.

“When you get blown out by 30, there’s too many things to fix and guys start to think, ‘It wasn’t anything I did,’ ” Baker said. “But this is fixable. Everybody can think of one play here or there and it’s a different outcome.

“We came back and practiced really hard (Monday) morning. I don’t think this is a group that will back it in, and as long as they don’t quit, I have no reason to be discouraged.”

Anteater Notes

Stepping into the lane early on opponent free-throw attempts Thursday and Saturday nights hurt the Anteaters. Lane violations resulted in Long Beach State and UC Santa Barbara getting extra free throws. The 49ers got one point from the error and the Gauchos two. Both teams needed the points to send the games into overtime. “We never do that,” Coach Rod Baker said. “You haven’t seen us called for two lane violations in 2 1/2 years.”. . . Irvine’s No. 1 doubles team of Chris Tontz and Fredrick Bach beat New Mexico’s Roy Canada and Coulter Wright, the No. 7-ranked doubles team in the country.