Shumard Lands at Fullerton on Wing, Prayer

A prominent member of the Yorba Linda Friends Church is going through a personal crisis--he just became athletic director at Cal State Fullerton--so this week the parish men’s group decided to help the best way it knows how.

“They all said, ‘We’ll pray for you,’ ” Bill Shumard says with a nod and a smile. “ ‘You know, you really bit off a big one there.’ ”

Sharp men’s group they have at the Yorba Linda Friends Church. They read the sports page as well as the Bible, so they know that Shumard, 40 and active and still very much alive, is about to get a head start on Purgatory.

When Shumard said yes to Fullerton last Friday, he said goodby to the plush assistant athletic director’s chair at USC and hello to a list of a problems that runs roughly as long as the Magna Carta.

We, however, will keep it brief.

Football: The boosters have champagne tastes, the program has a bread-and-water budget. For 15 years, it has been liquidation football--Division I-A kicks at Division III prices--and last spring, it nearly resulted in a clearance sale on helmets, pads and blocking sleds: Everything must go!

Basketball: Two players were found to have a credit problem--they were caught using stolen plastic--and both were booted off the team just before a first-round Big West tournament defeat to the University of the Pacific. One loss deserved another, the remaining Titans charged, and they demanded the resignation of Coach John Sneed, purportedly too tough a taskmaster. That was March, with an interim athletic director aboard. At the moment, a tentative truce remains in effect.

Baseball: Fullerton goes 34-22, wins the Big West co-championship, gets ranked 15th in the country by Collegiate Baseball and can’t get invited to the 48-team NCAA tournament, casting the Titans deeper into their Everybody’s-Out-To-Get-Us funk.

Smaller Sports: And getting smaller by the year. Cut a program here, a coach’s salary there, and still, by the end of the year, the athletic budget deficit hovered around $150,000.

Bill Shumard, welcome to Ed Carroll’s nightmare.

“One reporter asked me, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ ” Shumard says. “The way I look at it, Cal State Fullerton’s problems are not unique. Those are universal problems that face college athletics today.

“No matter how hard you strive, your student-athletes are not going to be perfect, they’re never going to be good enough. You’re never going to raise enough money. You’re never going to win enough.

“Those are the same problems we faced at USC, only on a much larger scale.”

Remember these greatest hits from Trojanland, ‘90-91?

“Todd Marinovich. Drug-testing. Sexual assault. Marvin Cobb. The credit card deal. Those were five really big things,” Shumard says. “I think USC runs a pretty good program, but there are occasional flaws in the system. As hard as you work, these situations are going to arise, and when they do you’re going to get tremendous notoriety. The key is, how do you react to solve that situation?

“The best thing you can do is work at it, re-evaluate and continue to get better.”

At the very least, Shumard assumes the haul with the right attitude and the right ideas. Take football, for instance. He wants to keep it, but he’s open to the idea of remodeling it, possibly in the Division I-AA or I-AAA form, for greater cost efficiency.

“Very definitely, (football) is going to make it,” he says. “The key is finding its level. Before this job ever came open, the president (Milton Gordon) set the tone for football by making sure football lived. That was a tremendous statement, at least in terms of direction.

“The president obviously saw good signs from the community. The (on-campus) stadium is halfway built, and football needed to have a future. Now, the situation needs to be carefully evaluated. . . .

“There’s a tremendous amount of concern inside, I noticed through the search process, that football is draining an otherwise really solid sports program. So football needs to be properly placed as soon as possible.”

Shumard admits that Division I-AAA (non-scholarship football for Division I athletic programs) “sounds like a great idea.” With Fresno State leaving the Big West, he wonders, “Is I-AA a viable option? Those decisions may be made for us very quickly. I’m anxious to put Gene Murphy in a position to do what he does best, and that’s coach football. We need to level the playing field a bit for him.”

That translates into fewer designated slaughters at LSU and Auburn. . . . and by the way, wasn’t that a nice parting gift Carroll left Murphy--at Clemson in 1993?

“You can justify one of those games a year as a learning experience--’Look, kids, we’re going to go to Clemson,’ ” Shumard says. “And that is a great experience for the kids, once a year .

“You get to doing it three, four times a year, and you’re mortgaging your program and hurting your morale. You can arguably finish second or third in your conference with an overall losing record, and what has that accomplished?”

Thirteen years in the Dodgers’ front office and three more at USC have lent a distinct hue to Shumard’s view.

He’s used to winning.

He expects Fullerton to come along for the ride.

Baseball, as it is, is fine, give or take a harder nudge into the NCAA’s rib cage. “Obviously,” he says, “we need to be in the playoff forefront--every year at Fullerton.”

Basketball, however, is in need of needle and pump.

“I know John had a tough time last year,” Shumard says. “He said to me, ‘When we sit down, I’ll tell you all about it,’ and I’m sure he will. I know he took over at a very tough spot and earned (a three-year) contract, which is going into its last year. I’m going to try to be a good listener and evaluator.

“I firmly believe that basketball can really do a tremendous amount for that school. The women’s program is already very successful and it’s done a lot to increase the interest level and awareness level at Fullerton. I think the men’s program can do the same.

“With (Jerry) Tarkanian stepping down at Vegas, there is a chance for Fullerton to make its move. With the revenue opportunities there are in men’s college basketball today, we cannot afford not to be competitive.

“And we will.”

Do you believe in omens? Shumard does. The night before his hiring, Fullerton announced the results of its spring fund-raising drive: a record $505,000 in pledges.

“A great sign,” Shumard says.

The men’s group apparently wasn’t kidding. At scrimp-and-save Cal State Fullerton, they have a word for this kind of intervention.

They say it’s divine.