He’ll Get to Stay on Lorenzo’s Soil

Lorenzo Romar knew it was time to move on, but he didn’t want to actually move.

So, at this fork in his rapidly ascending coaching career, the UCLA assistant coach given much of the credit for the school’s recruiting renaissance decided to take another road home.

“Every time I drove home from work,” Romar said Tuesday, “I saw the sign, ‘Pepperdine Next Right.’ ”

Sometime last week, after rebuffing several approaches from major programs, Romar finally decided to make that turn and accepted a three-year deal to take over a Pepperdine program that has slipped badly in the past two seasons.

During his three-plus years as Jim Harrick’s assistant, Romar, 37, turned down two previous offers by Pepperdine Athletic Director Wayne Wright, but, a few days after Wright’s last contact, he began to realize that the pieces fit at Pepperdine.

After a decade of city-to-city movement, he wouldn’t have to move his family from its Calabasas home eight miles from Pepperdine’s Malibu campus, he could maintain his deep recruiting ties in Southern California, he had found a school that shared his fervent Christian beliefs and he could satisfy the itch to run a program on his own.

But before he made the final decision to leave, Romar--whose contract was extended and upgraded by UCLA last spring--tried to find out from Harrick if he should wait at UCLA for the head coaching job to open.

“I asked him, ‘Coach, how much longer do you think you want to be here?’ And he said, ‘Quite a long time,’ ” Romar said at his introductory news conference at Pepperdine. “If Pepperdine wouldn’t have opened, I wouldn’t have asked him that. I was content being at UCLA.

“But when he mentioned that, I guess it just stirred up some thoughts, ‘Do you really want to be an assistant that long? Is that really what you want to do?’ I didn’t come here to be an assistant. I came here to be a head coach.”

Oregon State and Nevada Las Vegas approached him last spring, but Romar, who will remain at UCLA through this season, declined those offers--which surely were more lucrative than the three-year deal he got from Pepperdine.

Mark Gottfried, one of Romar’s best friends and a seven-year UCLA assistant before leaving to take over the Murray State program last spring, said he realized recently that Romar, despite declining the offers, was burning to be a head coach.

“To me, his greatest strength is his people skills, and that’s what recruiting is,” Gottfried said. “He’s one of the best in our business. He’s an attracter, he attracts others.

“So, I think especially there, where he can stay where he’s the strongest, Southern California, it’ll be a perfect marriage for both.”

For UCLA, though, Romar’s imminent departure so soon after Gottfried’s raises a tough question: Will the new Bruin staff be able to recruit players such as the sterling class of 1998--Toby Bailey, omm’A Givens, Kris Johnson and J.R. Henderson?

“[Romar] gave us four outstanding, marvelous years,” said Harrick, who started his own college head coaching career with a nine-year stint at Pepperdine. “[But] he got a package he couldn’t refuse at Pepperdine, and it’s not a shabby place to work.”

Steve Lavin, the No. 3 assistant during last year’s national title run, was moved up to No. 2 after Gottfried left and will move to No. 1 to fill Romar’s spot. Already, Bruin sources are pointing to former UCLA guard--and first-year Oregon State assistant--Michael Holton as the likely top candidate for the new opening.

But to the Bruin players he recruited, Romar was irreplaceable.

“I think he was one of the main reasons most of us came to UCLA,” Bailey said. “He was kind of a mediator between us and the coach. He understood us.”

Bailey said he knows that top recruits have reacted to the move. “I’ve already heard a lot of guys talking that they’re going to give Pepperdine a look now,” Bailey said.

Said Givens, who had a troubled family past and was recruited to Westwood from Alaska: “He was such a big part of my recruiting experience, me coming in from out of state, that’s one of the reasons he didn’t want to go to UNLV and Oregon State, aside from some of the others, was that he felt like he owed me and my family enough to stay here and help me through my first year of college.”

But, according to Harrick, the turnover so soon after the national title is both a tribute to the program’s success, and a chance to renew the fires.

“You could have said that when we lost [Brad] Holland and [Tony] Fuller [Harrick’s first assistants at UCLA who moved on to head coaching jobs and were replaced by Gottfried and Romar],” Harrick said.

“And it turned out to be a plus. And this will be a plus too. Steve Lavin’s been on our staff for five years. . . . He’s been taught well by Gottfried and Romar. I don’t think we’ll skip a beat.”