Ventura’s Hull Gauges Victory in Grade Points : Junior colleges: Pirate athletes boast impressive graduation rate under tutelage of region’s only academic athletic adviser.

In the darker ages of sports, high school hotshots who didn’t have the grades to play at a four-year college were usually sent to junior college where they were able to slack off and slide by, graduating with just enough knowledge to compute their scoring average. Having taken the back door into Division I, they would continue their pursuit of higher education by learning to read newspaper game summaries.

Thanks to tighter NCAA standards these days, four-year schools no longer can provide safe havens for academically challenged athletes. Which means that junior colleges are under pressure to graduate athletes who have actually opened a book.

In the last few years, California’s 107 junior colleges have taken strong measures to make the term student-athlete more than an oxymoron. In 1987, the California Community College Commission on Athletics recommended that each school hire an academic athletic adviser to work closely with athletes. It also toughened athletic eligibility requirements for matriculating students.

“Student-athletes (now) have to achieve in the classroom as well as on the athletic field,” said Walter Rilliet, state commissioner of athletics.

In the state, Rilliet says, several junior colleges are running model programs. One of them is Ventura College, the only junior college in the region with a full-time academic athletic adviser. Becky Hull, a 40-year-old mother of four, is cracking the whip at 460 athletes this semester, telling them:

“You do it the Becky Hull way, you get your goal. Do it your way--who knows?”

Before the advent of the AAA--a position requiring a master’s degree in both counseling and physical education and at least one year of coaching--athletes often got useless or erroneous advice. If an overburdened academic counselor wasn’t aware of NCAA requirements, an athlete could study at a junior college for two years and still remain woefully short of the credits necessary to transfer to a four-year school.

“I’ve heard horror stories (at Ventura College) of student-athletes having opportunities to get $20,000 scholarships but blowing it because they had no one to look out for them academically,” Hull said.

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Hull is Ventura’s watchdog, setting up education game plans, making sure athletes register properly, checking their academic progress during the semester and overseeing their admission requirements at four-year schools.

“A student-athlete has an idea of where he wants to go in athletics,” Hull said. “My job is to tell him how he’s going to get there.”

Hull has had dramatic success. In the seven years she has been at Ventura, 45 of 47 basketball players have received their Associate in Arts degrees and the graduation rate in some minor sports has been 100%. (The Commission on Athletics does not have statewide statistics and does not track graduation or transfer rates among junior college athletes.)

With stiff NCAA academic requirements for high school seniors--at least a 2.0 grade-point average in 11 core courses and 700 or better on the Scholastic Aptitude Test--junior colleges are getting more academically impaired athletes than ever before. Athletes who do not qualify under NCAA requirements must complete an Associate in Arts degree at a junior college in order to transfer to a Division I school.

Yet some athletes aren’t even aware that junior colleges are no longer rest stops on the road to Division I.

“They’ll tell me, ‘I just want to come here and play softball,’ ” Hull said. “I quickly wake them up to face reality. I tell them, ‘You have to be a student to be a student-athlete at this school. We’ve got to work on your academics. What made you fail math or English in high school? We’re going to correct that and bring up those skills.’ I compare learning in school with learning to swing a baseball bat: You do it in stages and it’s easy.”

Hull meets with new athletes individually but also greets entire teams. Before the first football practice, she stands in front of 200 or so candidates and gives them “my spiel” on the college’s this-is-not-a-joke academic emphasis. Invariably, half the team leaves, “going off to a school they think will be easier,” said Hull, who used to consider it a “personal failure” when a student-athlete dropped out of school.

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There is an ironic twist to Ventura’s hard-nosed approach to academics: It might turn off some athletes, but others are going to the college because of the chance to get a real education. In 1989, Dominguez High forward DiJon Bernard, whose grades had made him ineligible for Division I, decided to play his junior college basketball at Ventura after seeing the Pirates in action. What impressed him most was not so much the talent on the court but the firepower on the bench: Ventura’s star player was kept out of the game because he had missed a class.

“I knew right off that Ventura was the place for me,” said Bernard, who is in his second year at Cal State Fullerton.

Bernard is typical of some of the athletes who attend junior college: Never motivated to study in high school, he squeaked by with Cs and Ds, developing a jump shot while barely able to read or write. His teachers, he said, were indifferent and “didn’t care about my grades.”

Thanks to Hull--and basketball Coach Philip Mathews, a stickler for academics--Bernard became a student at Ventura. “Coach Mathews and Becky watched over me,” Bernard said. “I was able to do things I never did. Writing. Communicating. Putting my thoughts down on paper.”

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Bernard was graduated from Ventura with a 3.1 GPA, nailing a 3.8 the first semester his sophomore year. “Becky gave me the confidence that I wouldn’t have had,” he said. “Every time I got a good grade, I got a hug. I wanted to get good grades all the time to get compliments from her.”

At the athletic awards banquet his sophomore year, Bernard was the basketball team’s academic athlete of the year. When Hull presented him with the award, both were in tears.

Bernard is doing well at Fullerton (he had a 2.6 GPA last year) but still calls his Ventura teachers for help and keeps in touch with Hull. “I’ll never forget them,” he said. “I’m forever in their debt.”

Bernard’s transformation from underachiever to student showed Hull that AAAs can have an impact.

“There is no such thing as a ‘dumb jock,’ ” she said. “There are only athletes who have not been brought up to their potential.”