UC IRVINE NOTEBOOK / ROBYN NORWOOD : Winning Is Fast Becoming a Habit for Him

Pat Keenan has won so many races this season that Charlie Schober, UC Irvine’s swimming coach, can hardly remember Keenan’s losses.

“I’m trying to think of when he was beaten last,” Schober said. “It hasn’t been many times.”

At an invitational meet at Irvine this season, Keenan was part of seven victories: four individual races and three relay teams.

Keenan has defeated weaker competition as well as members of tougher teams, such as UC Santa Barbara and Nevada Las Vegas. In those meets, he won two individual races and swam a leg on a winning relay.

“He’s won the majority of races he’s been in,” Schober said.

Keenan’s success has been so dramatic that even he seems a bit flabbergasted by it.

“I was hoping to do well, but so far I’ve been faster than I thought I would,” Keenan said. “It’s been phenomenal, actually.”

The biggest races yet will be this week in the Big West Conference championships Thursday through Sunday at Belmont Plaza pool in Long Beach.

Keenan had three top-five finishes at the Big West meet last year, finishing second in the 500-yard freestyle and 200 butterfly and fifth in the 200 free.

Already this season, he has beaten his best times in the events by several seconds. That’s without racing shaved and tapered, as he will this week.

“Those are pretty significant drops if I can hold them through the taper,” Keenan said.

Keenan, a junior, has been an Irvine standout since his freshman season. But Schober thinks this has been his breakthrough year.

“He got close last year and got a little confidence together,” Schober said. “That makes a lot of difference. As a freshman and sophomore, he was feeling things out. Then he started looking around and saying, ‘Hey, I’m as good as anybody around here.’ ”

Keenan is hoping hard work and confidence can translate into victory.

“I’m really shooting to win the 500,” he said. “The other ones will be closer, but I still think I have a shot to win. The 500, I really think I can win.”

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Add swimming: Santa Barbara, which has won the last 14 Big West men’s swimming titles, is favored this week, with UNLV and Irvine right behind in the five-team competition.

Irvine is expected to be led by Keenan and junior Erik Walton, who won the 100 backstroke last season.

UNLV has won the last two women’s titles. Irvine, led by sophomore Laurel Hooper, junior Liz Koch and senior Danielle Pajer, is projected to finish sixth in the eight-team field.

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Tournament prospects: Time is running out and the men’s and women’s basketball teams still are trying to make the eight-team Big West tournament fields.

With four games left, the women’s team is 1-13 in conference, two victories behind No. 8 Nevada and one behind No. 9 San Jose State, which the Anteaters face Thursday in San Jose.

The men, 3-10 with five games remaining, are in slightly better position. They are tied for eighth with San Jose State, and almost certainly need to beat the Spartans Thursday in San Jose. (Irvine won the first meeting, 73-64.)

The men’s other remaining games are at Pacific and Cal State Long Beach and against Nevada Las Vegas and New Mexico State at home.

San Jose finishes with Fullerton and Santa Barbara at home and Long Beach and Santa Barbara on the road.

Nevada is tied with Irvine and San Jose State in the victory column, but has two more losses and finishes the season at UNLV, New Mexico State and Utah State.

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Baker contract option: Also hanging in the balance in the final two weeks--unless a decision already has been made--is whether Coach Rod Baker, in the second year of a four-year deal, will be given a contract extension through the 1996-97 season.

Baker has two years left on the agreement negotiated when he was hired in 1991, but the contract includes an option for a two-year rollover as a reward for good progress after the second year.

The two-year extension looked like a sure thing after last year’s recruiting success and the team’s upset of top-seeded UC Santa Barbara in the Big West tournament. But the Anteaters’ 5-16 record is well short of expectations this season, and the athletic director who hired Baker, Tom Ford, is gone.

Dan Guerrero, who became athletic director in December, declined to discuss the criteria for the decision on the rollover.

“I think at this point in time, any discussion relative to the contract needs to be addressed after the season,” Guerrero said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about the contract while he’s trying to get the team in the Big West tournament.”

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Matsuhara on the record: Colleen Matsuhara’s first women’s team at Irvine was 5-22. This year’s team is 2-20, an apparent step back.

“In terms of wins and losses, I don’t look at that,” Matsuhara said. “We made improvements. Our games against Long Beach were closer and our Hawaii margin was a lot less.”

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Wrestling mania: Ed Carroll, the former Cal State Fullerton athletic director, usually spends his time wrestling with numbers as Irvine’s associate athletic director for finance.

But he recently took two students to the mat during an intramural wrestling tournament, winning the heavyweight division with two pins.

Carroll, 42, weighed in at 194 but pinned a 215-pound opponent in 30 seconds in the semifinals. In the final, he won a close match by pinning a student with 18 seconds left in the four-minute match.

“It was fun because if I had just pinned him quickly, it would have been easy,” Carroll said. “In fact, he got on top of me and ripped on me for awhile. I had to reach down. I also had to go to the chiropractor two days later because my neck was so stiff.”

Nevertheless, he won the title over a field of three wrestlers perhaps 20 years his junior.

“George Foreman is what, 43, and he’s fighting the big boys,” said Carroll, who admits he picks his spots, staying away from more competitive open tournaments.