Notebook : College Tennis Hall of Fame to Induct Ex-Bruins Herb Flam, Charles Pasarell

The late Herb Flam and Charles Pasarell, who were star tennis players at UCLA and later rose to national and international prominence, will be inducted Tuesday into the Collegiate Tennis Hall of Fame during the NCAA championships at the University of Georgia in Athens.

In 1950, Flam won NCAA singles and doubles (with Gene Garrett) titles and was a finalist in singles at the U.S. Open, where he lost to Arthur Larsen.

Both Flam and Pasarell were ranked among the nation’s top 10 players nine times, Flam from 1948 through 1958 and Pasarell from 1963 through 1974. Both also played Davis Cup international tennis, Flam for four years and Pasarell for five.

Pasarell, who plays senior tennis these days, was involved in two of the longest tournament matches of all time. In 1969, before the advent of the tie-breaker, he lost to Pancho Gonzalez in a first-round match at Wimbledon that lasted 112 games and in which the final scores were 22-24, 1-6, 16-14, 6-3, 11-9.

In the 1968 National Indoor tournament, Pasarell and partner Ron Holmberg played 144 games before losing a quarterfinal match to Bobby Wilson and Mark Cox of England, 26-24, 17-19, 30-28.

LaVar Ball, who starred in basketball for West Los Angeles College the past two seasons, has signed a letter of intent with Washington State University.

Ball, a 6-6, 227-pound center-forward averaged 22.2 points and 12 rebounds for WLAC Coach Charles Sands this season and earned all-league honors as both a freshman and sophomore.

A 1985 graduate of Canoga Park High School, Ball, 19, starred in football, basketball and track in high school. He plans to major in business management in college.

WSU Coach Kelvin Sampson, who served as recruiting coordinator for the Cougars for two years before being named head coach in April, said, “We were looking for depth when we signed LaVar. We’re not asking him to play 40 minutes. We wanted someone who can come and contribute next year. He can.”

Sampson said that a “lot of people may have been afraid of him because of his size. I’m not interested in size, but in the size of his heart--and he rates high there. He is an excellent student.”

Eight teams from Marlborough School will be among the boys and girls squads that will be honored for academic achievement Tuesday at the second CIF-Southern Section Ford/Angels Academic Awards Program at Anaheim Stadium.

Four teams from Marymount High and one from Bel-Air Prep also will be honored. Marlborough and Marymount are girls schools; Bel-Air is coeducational.

Winners of team awards were determined by the highest combined grade-point averages compiled by members in college preparatory courses.

Individuals who had grade-point averages of at least 3.5 in their junior and senior years also will be honored, and the only student-athlete from the Westside who qualified was also from Marlborough: Stephanie Smith, whose GPA was 3.8.

The Marlborough teams and their combined GPAs are: badminton, 3.42; basketball, 3.26; cross country, 3.36; soccer, 3.22; softball, 3.29; swimming, 3.36; tennis, 3.09, and volleyball, 3.4.

Marymount teams are: basketball, 3.27; cross country, 3.21; swimming, 3.2, and tennis, 3.04. The girls basketball team from Bel-Air Prep had a combined average of 3.21.

Carol Altshiller, who coached Hamilton High School golf teams to league championships in 1984 and 1985, reports that she is having the same kind of success at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, a Westside magnet school in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Altshiller, a physical education teacher at the magnet school both now and while she was coaching at Hamilton, said that her center team recently captured the championship of the city’s 3-A League with an 8-1-1 record.

It was the fourth straight league title for one of her teams. In 1984, Hamilton won a 1-A League championship and followed that with a 3-A title in 1985. Altshiller’s first team at the center won a 2-A title last year.

The center team will compete against other league titlists and top individuals in the citywide tournament May 19-20 at Griffith Park Golf Course. The top two teams and 10 best individuals in the city tourney will advance to state competition in early June at North Ranch Country Club in Westlake Village.

Altshiller, a former UCLA golfer, said that her top three golfers are juniors who were each named to the all-league first team. No. 1 is Stefan Glover, No. 2 Jason Spakes and No. 3 Josh Glotzer. No. 4 Dean Oda was a second-team all-leaguer, and No. 5 is senior Keith Nakano.