CSUN’s Merry Prankster : College football: Not even a pair of lopsided losses can stop the fun for first-year Coach Dave Baldwin.

NORTHRIDGE — Shortly after his team was beaten like a dusty rug for the second week in a row, Cal State Northridge Coach Dave Baldwin strode into the postgame press conference and did the last thing anyone would expect from a losing football coach.

He smiled.

Then he leaned on the podium and calmly chatted with reporters about how he never thought his team could beat nationally ranked Northern Arizona anyway. Heck, the Matadors actually had managed a couple of decent drives against the Lumberjacks’ second-string defense.

Typical Baldwin. Another coach’s nightmare is his dream. Many coaches might have compared taking over the Northridge football program with trying to save the Titanic with a bucket.

Not Baldwin.

“I’ve got my dream job,” said Baldwin, a Northridge graduate who replaced Bob Burt in May. “I’m having a ball, absolutely loving it. There’s not a negative that I’ve seen.”

If Baldwin’s house was being remodeled, he would grin as sawdust fell in his cereal. In his view, it’s the final product that counts.

He is confident that someday Northridge will have 63 scholarships, regularly challenge for the Big Sky Conference title and move into the nation’s upper echelon of Division I-AA football teams.

Of course, what he has now is a team with 20 scholarships that narrowly avoided extinction last spring. With only four returning starters, Northridge goes into today’s game at Southwest Texas State with a 1-2 record. The Matadors have been outscored, 120-7, in their last two games.

But you wouldn’t know it by watching Baldwin joke on the practice field or give his players yet another pep talk. His goal, after all, is no less than to go 7-0 the rest of the season.

“That’s what’s really different about Coach Baldwin,” said Virgil Nelson, a senior defensive tackle. “He always seems to have a brand new battery each week. He never lets a few obstacles get in the team’s way.”

Baldwin’s rosy attitude stems--remarkably--from personal tragedy.

In 1980, while Baldwin was coaching a San Jose State football game, a baby-sitter discovered that his 3-month-old daughter Brittany had stopped breathing. The baby-sitter startled Brittany back to consciousness, saving her life, but the infant’s brain already had been without oxygen too long. She was left blind and deaf and with severe brain damage.

Brittany spent nine years in a state hospital, unable to see or hear family members during their weekly visits. She died in 1989.

So pardon Baldwin if a 68-7 loss to Northern Arizona doesn’t seem like the end of the world.

After that defeat--the most lopsided in Northridge history--Baldwin boarded the team bus and told his players: “There are [more important] things in life than what just happened to us.”

He was speaking from experience.

“It’s definitely changed my perspective,” Baldwin said of his daughter’s death. “Family comes first.”

*

That was his thought last spring, when he bolted into the high school where his wife taught and interrupted her special education class to ask whether it would be OK if he accepted an offer to return to his alma mater as head football coach.

Kathleen Baldwin, who also is a Northridge graduate, just smiled and gave her husband a kiss. After all, the Baldwins had grown accustomed to moving vans.

A Granada Hills High graduate, Baldwin played a year at Southern Utah before coming home to play at Northridge from 1975-77. He then joined the Matador coaching staff for two years under Jack Elway.

Baldwin followed Elway to San Jose State for four years and to Stanford for five more. But Elway and his staff were fired following the 1988 season. Baldwin, thinking of his family again, decided not to pursue jobs out of state because of Brittany’s condition.

Baldwin spent the fall of 1989 out of football. Brittany died around Thanksgiving.

“It really was a blessing because she was a very special child, but she suffered severely,” Baldwin said. “She never walked. She never saw us. I don’t believe she heard us.”

That sad chapter of his life closed, Baldwin gathered his wife and three other children and headed south to become coach at Santa Barbara City College. His record there was 25-16 in four years, including a 9-2 mark and a Western State Conference North Division title in 1991.

In 1994, he returned to Northern California, taking over the struggling program at Santa Rosa College. After winning only once the two previous seasons, the Cubs were 8-3 under Baldwin.

As he was hopping around California, Baldwin kept one eye on Northridge. Despite the program’s difficulties--earthquake damage, lack of proper funding and player walkouts--Baldwin jumped when, on his 40th birthday, the coaching position came open.

After Baldwin interviewed, he came home and told his wife he was going to be offered the job. It was just a hunch--but a correct one.

“He looks at the positive side of things,” said former athletic director Bob Hiegert, who hired Baldwin. “I think that was important for the job. We needed someone who was very realistic in terms of assessment of the program and who could take it through the first few years, which were not going to be very positive years.”

Optimism is a Baldwin trademark. He typically strolls around the practice field, smiling and twirling his whistle on a cord around his index finger. The pressure of winning seems to be the farthest thing from his mind.

As the Matadors were practicing fake punts recently, Baldwin yelled to assistant Jeff Kearin, who handles the special teams: “Coach Kearin, you are going to tell me before we do this in a game, right? . . . Remember that job at USC you had? Think you could get it back?”

When a player is tripped up, the guy yelling “Blown tire!” is probably Baldwin.

“He just loves coaching football,” Kearin said. “The smile is not a facade. It’s very easy for a team after you get beaten by 50 and 60 points to get down on itself and lose confidence, even early in the year. But he genuinely believes, and has spread the feeling throughout the team, that we are good enough to win the rest of our games.”

Kearin remembers Baldwin’s attitude after a 52-0 loss to Idaho State.

“Anyone else might have looked at that and said, ‘Wow, these boys [are bad]. They don’t have anything good to offer,’ ” Kearin said. “But there were some good things. If you look at the film, we did some good things and he found those.”

Said junior safety James Woods: “I think him being here has made this whole year really fun for me. He brought the love back to the game for me.”

*

Baldwin is also a practical joker. He cuts out faces and tapes them over those of the people in the pictures on his assistants’ desks. He’s also infamous for his prank phone calls.

Bob Cloud, Northridge’s sports information director, recently left a press credential for a sportswriter from San Francisco named Roger Dunn.

There is no such person. The request came from Baldwin, who disguised his voice on the phone.

Baldwin still hasn’t revealed the joke to Cloud. “It’s about time he should read about it.”

“He’s the Jay Johnstone of football,” said Ron Ponciano, Northridge defensive coordinator, comparing Baldwin to the former Dodger prankster. “As hard as it’s been to smile the last couple weeks, he keeps things on an even keel where we can laugh.”

But Baldwin is more than just a comedian. “I see a lot more respect for Coach Baldwin than for previous coaches,” said Nelson, in his second year on the Matador defensive line.

Despite his stated goal of winning the final seven games, Baldwin understands the limitations of the program. However, he also envisions a bright future now that Northridge has been admitted to the Big Sky Conference.

Baldwin will have 40 scholarships next year, and eventually about 60. The football facilities also will be renovated.

He said the chance to rebuild his alma mater’s football team from the rubble--almost literally--is the reason he took the job.

Said Baldwin: “If you can take over a program that has really been on the bottom . . . and turn it around, it really becomes your program.”