On-Time Departure : Trakh No Longer Questions Move From Brea-Olinda to Pepperdine

The differences between coaching high school and college basketball players? There aren’t many says Mark Trakh, in his first season as the Pepperdine women’s coach after 13 outrageously successful seasons at Brea-Olinda High School.

“They may be 19, 20 or 21, but they’re still kids,” Trakh says. “They still need positive strokes, motivation, open lines of communication.”

What about recruiting? Is that the toughest thing about college coaching? Nah.

“Some people say I did a pretty good job of that at Brea,” Trakh jokes. “We put 13 kids on Division I scholarships at Brea, I sat in on 50 to 60 home visits, and I made some campus visits with kids. It gave me an idea of how coaches did it, what worked and didn’t work.”

Trakh has made a fairly smooth transition from high school to college. His Waves are 8-11 entering Tuesday night’s nonconference game at Cal State Fullerton, they’re competitive--only three losses have been by 10 points or more--and Trakh has received an unwritten commitment from one of the state’s top community college recruits as he begins to put his signature on the Pepperdine program.

But one aspect of this new job has been very unsettling for Trakh, one he’s not sure he’ll ever grow comfortable with:

Road trips.

“He hates to fly,” said Pepperdine senior Aimee McDaniel, a former Brea-Olinda standout who was reunited with Trakh this season. “When the plane starts to take off, you can see the blood rush from his face.”

Trakh, whose team has played in Lincoln, Neb., Portland and Spokane, Wash., has always feared flying.

“You have no control of the plane, you’re 30,000 feet up, going 500 m.p.h. . . . “ Trakh says. “Maybe it’s me, but I think that’s a pretty natural fear.”

Major anxiety also gripped Trakh last summer when his coaching career was about to take off.

Trakh, who had a 356-42 career record, including 120-1 in the Orange League, and won four State championships at Brea, accepted the Pepperdine position June 16. But after meeting with his players and assistant coaches on June 18, Trakh had a change of heart.

He called Pepperdine Athletic Director Wayne Wright late that night and declined the offer, only hours after the Malibu school had made the official announcement that Trakh was replacing Ron Fortner.

After several meetings with players, ex-players, coaches and community members over the next week, Trakh came to the conclusion that if he turned this job down, he might never get another opportunity to coach in college.

He called Wright to see if the job was still available. It was, and Wright took Trakh back. On June 30, Trakh became the Pepperdine coach. Again.

“There were a lot of anxious moments that week,” said Trakh, who had applied for previous openings at Cal State Fullerton, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara and Hawaii and turned down the Chapman job in 1989.

“I went with my heart the first time I turned it down. When you’re at a place for 13 years, when you watch kids grow up from elementary school until they’re seniors in high school, you become emotionally tied to a place.”

The clincher in the decision to decline the job might have come during a discussion with then-assistant John Hattrup and long-time friends Bill Lantini and John Joslin, who run the Brea junior girls’ basketball programs.

“We were sitting around the office, talking about all the great players who were coming up and all the championships we could win,” Trakh said. “And then Hattrup says, ‘Yeah, you can see the ocean from Pepperdine, but on a good day you can see it from Brea, too.’ ”

Problem was, there were simply too many good days at Brea; coaching had become a breeze. Trakh had done such a good job building the dynasty and developing the feeder system, and his teams were so successful that his job was no longer a challenge.

The Ladycats were so dominant--50-point victories were routine, and Brea won 31 or more games in each of Trakh’s last five seasons--that Trakh could usually cruise on automatic pilot.

And this is what led him back to Pepperdine.

“It would have been a big mistake to not take this job,” Trakh said. “Things got so easy at Brea that I got complacent. The youth coaches handled the kids, the players all wanted to play and excel. I really didn’t have to do much.”

The thing Trakh did the least of at Brea is what he wanted to do most--coach.

“The past few years, I was really only coaching three or four games a season,” Trakh, 35, said. “The rest of the time, especially in the Orange League, since our athletes were so much more skilled, all you’re doing is substituting. That’s the extent of your coaching.

“But that makes you complacent, and you don’t work as hard. I’m like, ‘How hard can you prepare for some of these teams?’ But that was more a reflection on the kids than everyone else. We won because we had better players, not coaching. It’s not like that at this level.”

Now when Trakh walks into a gym, he has the new sensation of being on the same level as his opponents.

“You’ve got not only the potential to lose every game, but the potential to be blown out every game,” Trakh said. “It’s funny, you can have a real good game against someone good, then lose to a team you should beat. Anything can happen at this level. In the Orange League, there was no way in the world, barring natural catastrophe, anyone could beat us.”

Trakh has already lost as many games this season as he lost in the previous six at Brea, but he seems to be handling it well.

“The fear of losing is a good thing, it’s a good motivator,” Trakh said. “I have no idea whether I’m a good coach, but I think the next three or four years will tell. I definitely have a lot to learn. I look at some of the great college coaches I’ve seen and thought, ‘Wow, they really know what they’re doing.’ I want to get to that point.”

He’d also like Pepperdine to ascend to new heights. The Waves have hovered around the .500 mark for the past 10 years, they’ve never won a West Coast Conference championship, and they’ve never earned an NCAA tournament berth. McDaniel thinks the new coach will get Pepperdine on the runway toward success.

“He’s already brought a lot of things we were lacking, like team spirit, and he knows how to get people motivated,” McDaniel said. “The players are learning more about each other, plus, we respect him, and he respects us. I think in a couple of years he’ll have a Brea-type of program established here.”

Pepperdine, prepare for takeoff.

Trakh Record

The year-by-year high school and college coaching record of Mark Trakh (through games of Feb. 5):

1980-81: Brea-Olinda (12-9) 1981-82: Brea-Olinda (22-5) 1982-83: Brea-Olinda (24-5) 1983-84: Brea-Olinda (29-2) 1984-85: Brea-Olinda (29-1) 1985-86: Brea-Olinda (27-5)

Southern Section 3-A champion 1986-87: Brea-Olinda (25-5) 1987-88: Brea-Olinda (25-5) 1988-89: Brea-Olinda (31-2)

Southern Section 3-A champion, CIF Division III state champion 1989-90: Brea-Olinda (33-1)

Southern Section 3-A champion 1990-91: Brea-Olinda (33-1)

Southern Section 2-AA champion, CIF Division II state champion 1991-92: Brea-Olinda (32-2)

Southern Section 3-AA champion, CIF Division III state champion 1992-93: Brea-Olinda (32-2)

Southern Section 2-AA champion, CIF Division II state champion 1993-94: Pepperdine (8-11)