Tony Dodero -- From the Newsroom

Starting today, readers of the Daily Pilot will see something a little

different in our news, entertainment, calendar and sports pages.

It’ll be familiar to some, and we think a welcome change to many more.

That’s because today we get reacquainted with an old friend -- the

University of California at Irvine. Or, from here on out, UCI for short.

A little history here may help. The Daily Pilot covered UCI for many,

many years. But in 1991, we scaled back the paper in several areas and

quit our coverage of UCI and other communities to concentrate solely on

Newport Beach and Costa Mesa.

It’s been a winning formula and we are proud to be the true hometown

newspaper for these towns. We don’t believe renewing our coverage of UCI,

which literally sits on the Newport Beach eastern border, changes that

one bit. In fact, it enhances it.

And to me, it seems only fitting after resurrecting our Sunday Edition

this year, which also went by the wayside in 1991, we are now revisiting

UCI 10 years later.

So far in my conversations with local residents and leaders, there

haven’t been any objections. And university officials are happy, as well.

“We are extremely excited about it,” said Harry Battson, the assistant

vice chancellor of communications for UCI. “We have so many of our own

university community members who live in Newport-Mesa. It’s a very

important audience for us and we want them to have more information about

what the university is doing and appreciate what we are doing in the

community, as well as on campus.”

Indeed, many of our students and student athletes attend UCI. Many

professors and other employees of the university live right here in

Newport-Mesa.

In the sporting area, UCI is red hot, which our Sports Editor Roger

Carlson spells out in today’s Sports pages. The Anteater basketball team

won 25 games last year and if it wasn’t for a letdown in the Big West

tourney, it would have probably gone to the NCAA tournament. The baseball

team returns this year and volleyball, water polo and rowing all have

many, many local ties.

“People really don’t appreciate how big a role UCI plays in this

community,” Battson said.

Battson noted that the university is undergoing tremendous growth both

in the student population and in construction projects, of which, he

says, there are 15 major ones taking place right now.

Those projects total about $230 million and include work on a new

studio arts building, renovation to the theater hall, new research

buildings and on-campus apartments for students.

They’ve commissioned Maya Lin, the creator of the Vietnam War Memorial

in Washington D.C, to do a sculpture for the School of the Arts plaza and

UCI officials are undertaking plans for a new building for the Graduate

School of Management, the leading school in the country when applying

information technology to businesses, Battson said.

And, of course, there is the $3.5-million stadium project for the

newly resurrected baseball team. The stadium, which will have 3,500

seats, is being called a “contemporary Wrigley Field,” Battson said.

As for student growth, when we last visited the campus in 1991, it had

somewhere in the range of 15,000 students.

But it’s expected to grow by 1,500 alone just this year to about

21,500 students in the 2001-02 school year.

Battson also points out that UCI is ranked among the 10 best public

universities in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine, it

has 17 faculty members who have been admitted to the National Academy of

Sciences and students who regularly win the biggest national

scholarships.

“We’re really a top-notch public research university,” he said.

We in the newsroom are excited about this new venture, and we hope you

will be, too. And in case you are wondering, we will not be covering the

city of Irvine, just the university.

Drop us a line to let us know what you think either to my e-mail and

phone below or to the paper’s main e-mail at [email protected] or

our Readers Hotline at 949-642-6086.

***

Our newsroom was invaded last Thursday by a pack of Webelos.

No reason for alarm though. Webelos, if you don’t know, are Cub Scouts

who have graduated to the top level just before going on to Boy Scouts.

I know because I was once a Webelo, though because I had great

difficulty doing things like climbing trees, which were requirements back

in those old days, my Boy Scout career got kind of cut short.

Ten-year-old Newport Elementary student Christian Scott, and Mariners’

student Craig Douglass Clayton and Newport Heights’ student Forrest

Osborne, both 11, along with den moms Meggan Clayton and Juliana Osborne,

all got a tour of the Daily Pilot newsroom, where they met people with

exciting jobs like reporters, photographers, page designers, sports

editors, city editors and even those with not so exciting jobs -- like

me.

Whether we ruined these members of Webelos pack No. 746 at such a

tender age and lured them into the wicked world of journalism, it is

still too early to tell.

But I think they had a lot of fun anyway.

*

* TONY DODERO is the editor. His column appears on Mondays. If you

have story ideas or concerns about news coverage, please send messages

either via e-mail to o7 [email protected] or by phone at

949-574-4258.