Barry Faulkner
Basketball regrouped with a winning season and baseball added another
30-win campaign, but it was tennis, which captured its first Big West
Conference championship since 1993, that topped the list of UC Irvine
men's team accomplishments in 2004-05.
Seniors Brian Morton and Rye Kashiwabara were named first-team
All-Big West in singles and doubles and helped lead Coach Steve
Clark's Anteaters to their first NCAA tournament appearance since
1997.
The Anteaters defeated University of the Pacific, 4-3, in the
conference tournament final to improve to 14-8, before falling at
Pepperdine in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
Victor Lamm was named Freshman of the Year in the Big West and
also garnered second-team all-conference recognition.
Coach Pat Douglass' basketball team rebounded from an 11-17
campaign in 2003-04 to record a 16-13 mark that included one win in
two games of the Big West Conference tournament.
The Anteaters rebounded from consecutive losses at USC and UCLA to
post a season-high five-game winning streak that included a road
victory over a Santa Clara squad that had earlier upset eventual
national champion North Carolina.
Another big win was a 97-81 conference triumph at Cal State
Fullerton, which made a strong late-season run that included a pair
of wins in the National Invitation tournament.
UCI finished fifth in the Big West and defeated Idaho in the first
round of the conference tournament, before being eliminated by Cal
State Northridge in the quarterfinals.
The team's lone senior, 6-foot-8 center Greg Ethington, was named
the tem's Most Outstanding Player, while junior guards Ross
Schraeder, Jeff Gloger and Aaron Fitzgerald also distinguished
themselves throughout the season.
Schrader finished with a team-high 12.9 scoring average that
included 79 three-pointers. His three-point shooting accuracy of
43.9% ranked 11th nationally.
Gloger became the school's career steals leader with 167, while
Fitzgerald averaged a conference-leading 5.2 assists per contest.
Postseason news included the loss of eight-year assistant coach
Todd Lee, who became head coach at Kentucky Wesleyan, as well as the
recent reconstructive knee surgery undergone by Gloger, who tore his
ACL in workouts in late May.
The addition of first-year coach Dave Serrano to a baseball squad
that returned several talented and experienced players from the group
that made the school's first NCAA Division I regionals appearance in
2004, led to great optimism heading into the 2005 campaign.
