Women’s Basketball Team Tries to Hang On

It’s a long, painful tumble from the NCAA tournament to a battle for the sixth and final spot in the Big West tournament, but that’s where UC Irvine’s women’s basketball team finds itself.

The Anteaters (10-13 overall and 5-9 in conference) are tied with Nevada for sixth place, three games behind fifth-place Long Beach State and two games ahead of Cal State Fullerton.

Irvine, which has lost five of its last six games, travels to Hawaii and San Jose State this weekend before returning home to host Nevada on Feb. 29.

Last March, Coach Colleen Matsuhara was holding a conference trophy above her head and inhaling the rarefied air of the NCAA playoffs. This season, she’s sucking the fumes near the bottom of Big West standings. But Matsuhara is trying desperately to clutch a bit of perspective.

Four of the starters who helped carry UC Irvine to its first appearance in the NCAA postseason are no longer with the team and the players who remain don’t have the experience to maintain the momentum of last year.

“I would hope that the goal of all our players is to make the Big West tournament and then take it one game at a time from there,” Matsuhara said. “Our problem now has been our inability to finish off plays and find a way to end a game on top. We’ve just had an inconsistency of execution. We need to be able to focus for a full 40 minutes.”

Senior center Allah-mi Basheer is still in the middle making things happen and sophomore forward Leticia Osegura has become another force inside. But sagging defenses have put the onus on Irvine’s perimeter players to make opponents guard everyone and the Anteaters’ outside shooting has been inconsistent at best.

Irvine is shooting 42% from the field and that statistic looks even worse when you consider that Basheer and Osegura are 50% or better from the floor.

“It’s no secret that our opponents are going to double- and even triple- down on Allah-mi,” Matsuhara said. “And I have to give her credit for being a team leader and trying to carry the burden all by herself. She certainly has the biggest motivation to do well this year, but she can’t do it alone.”

Osegura, who has scored in double figures in 10 the last 11 games and is averaging 17 points and 10 rebounds in Big West play, has been a big plus, as has freshman guard Princess Hatcher, who took over the full-time point guard duties after senior Tamera Thomas left the team for personal reasons Jan. 13.

“To see the progress with Princess, to see where she has come from and what she’s blossomed into, that’s been a joy for us,” Matsuhara said.

But “joy” is not a word Matsuhara uses often these days. She’s reduced to hoping for a strong finish in conference play and maybe some kind of postseason miracle.

And then there’s always the Anteaters’ old stand-by: “Wait ‘til next year.” The Irvine roster includes one senior, one junior, three sophomores and six freshmen.

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“Now pitching . . . “: The new rule in men’s volleyball which allows a player to serve from anywhere along the end line has made the jump serve an even more potent weapon by improving the angle of attack and allowing a greater margin for error.

It also has elevated the status of good jump servers to something akin to an ace closer out of the bullpen.

“Last year, we didn’t have the ability to put people away,” Coach Andy Read said. “We lost a lot of fourth and fifth games when we had 13 points. It happened against Northridge, Stanford and Hawaii. Those were matches that were there for us to take. If we win two of them, we go to the playoffs for sure and maybe one would have been enough.”

So Read went looking for his version of Lee Smith and came back with Tustin High’s Donnie Rafter. And last week, the freshman did exactly what he was recruited to do: win a match with his serve.

Irvine and Loyola Marymount split the first four games of their Mountain Pacific Sports Federation match at Crawford Hall Feb. 13 and were locked up, 20-20, in the deciding game. Rafter went back to serve and the Anteaters won a point to go up by one. Then Rafter whacked an ace that gave Irvine the victory.

“It’s really tough to come off the bench and start nailing your serve,” Read said. “It’s a little like pinch hitting in baseball, and Donnie’s struggled sometimes. But he’s also gotten the big hit a lot.

“He has one of the best jump serves in Division I. He’s about 6-1, 6-2 and jumps maybe two or three miles high. And I don’t know what it is about his shoulder mechanically, but every volleyball player would love to have this guy’s arm. It’s a trip hammer. A trip hammer at the net and a trip hammer on the end line.”

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Trio of woes: The Irvine men’s team is the worst in the conference at defending three-pointers--opponents are shooting 38% from beyond the arc--but Coach Rod Baker thinks it’s as much bad fortune as bad defense.

“We’ve just caught some people when they were really hot,” Baker said.

UC Santa Barbara’s Danee Prince made four of six in the first game and four of seven in the second. New Mexico State’s Charles Gosa made three of four at Irvine and the Aggies’ Leban Bostjan made three of three in New Mexico. Nevada’s Richard Brown made three of five. Southern Utah’s Daryl Christopher made four of five. And Cal State Fullerton’s Chris Dade made seven of eight in Titan Gym Jan. 13.

“It’s not like we don’t go after people or we don’t have a hand up,” Baker said. “We knocked Dade down three times [at Fullerton] and he made them all. That’s the best defense there is. You can’t knock ‘em down before they shoot the ball.”

Anteater Notes

The men’s and women’s swim teams host the Big West Conference championships at Belmont Plaza in Long Beach Thursday through Saturday. Preliminary events begin at 10:30 a.m. each day with the finals scheduled for 6 p.m. UC Santa Barbara’s men’s team has won the last 17 conference titles and the Gaucho women have won three in a row. The Irvine men were third last year and the women finished seventh. Junior Gwen Yoshizumi ranks second in the Big West in the 100-yard backstroke with a season-best time of 58.84. Sophomore David Durden is the top-ranked swimmer on the men’s team. He’s seventh in the 200 butterfly (1:56.82). . . . Sophomore Borya Orloff, who was third in the Big West in the pole vault and holds the school record in the event, and senior Jo-Jo Yaba, who was second in the 5,000 meters and third in the 10,000, will redshirt this season. . . . The golf team opens the season under first-year Coach Jeff Johnston in the Arrowhead Inland Empire Invitational Monday at Arrowhead Country Club in San Bernardino. . . . The men’s volleyball team hosts No. 4 UCLA on Feb. 27 and No. 7 Pepperdine March 2 in Crawford Hall.