COURTING SUCCESS USC VOLLEYBALL COACH HALEY GOING FOR FOURTH TITLE.

Byline: Jill Painter Staff Writer

Mick Haley sat in the corner space of the USC office he shares with his coaching staff and sipped coffee while admiring green and blue squares that hang on the wall.

Those squares are hip around Heritage Hall. They're pieces of volleyball courts on which he has coached the Trojans to NCAA volleyball titles the past two years. He has a few more sitting in a stack on his bookshelf and joked he should sell them on eBay.

Haley can add to the collection as the Trojans try to win their third consecutive NCAA championship, something no other school or coach has done since the inception of the NCAA Tournament in 1981. USC (23-5) plays Minnesota (32-4) in the semifinals at the Long Beach Arena tonight.

Another title and Haley will have four, which would make him the second coach to hold that distinction. He won a championship and made another final at Texas, then was coach of the women's U.S. National team from 1997-2000.

His international stint produced mixed results. But there is no mistaking his success as a college coach. He knows virtually nothing but winning, especially at USC, where he's 114-10.

``I've stolen everything I can from everybody that's good,'' Haley said. ``If you want to win, you have to play defense and you have to have a certain attitude. You have to have passion. It's all about effort and enthusiasm.''

Haley's got it. When Haley, 61, talks about incorporating ideas from anybody and everybody, he isn't kidding. He started by implementing a structured schedule, similar to the one used by his Little League coach. He walks down the hall and chats with USC football coach Pete Carroll in the offseason. Last year's topic was how to maintain championship intensity.

Haley may not be prone to jumping in any pools, but he's well-liked just the same. He's a little quirky and players often laugh at phrases such as ``spanking the ball'' or ``golly'' or ``geez.'' His practices are grueling.

Then there's this: his thing about goals. There are goals for everything. The only goal USC hasn't met is making an overall grade-point average that's higher than the women's soccer team. It's about the only thing USC hasn't accomplished in Haley's four years.

USC athletic director Mike Garrett, who rarely misses a match, loves it.

``Mick is a disciplinarian,'' Garrett said. ``He creates structure and within that structure, he has a lot of expectation. The girls identify with that and accept that challenge.''

USC's quest for a three-peat doesn't garner a miniscule amount of attention that the quest for a football repeat does. But it does make Garrett believe volleyball can be a revenue-generating sport at USC. Garrett believes if Haley keeps this pace, the team can draw 5,000-7,000 for matches when it plays in the new arena, the Galen Center. Haley buys it.

Haley loves the atmosphere. Volleyball players do strength and quickness drills with the football team in the spring. He's such a sports fanatic and so loves going to football games that he tries to match his volleyball schedule with the football team's road games. He likes that his players rub shoulders with water polo players and other successful athletes.

He's a sports junkie. He collected baseball cards when he was a boy and memorized their statistics. He still has 11 Roberto Clemente cards and 13 of Hank Aaron's. He said there wasn't much else to do in Angola, Ind.

He played baseball his first year at Ball State and wound up a setter on the volleyball team the next few years. He'd never played before college.

His mom, Pauline, is 90 and lives in Indiana. She's in an assisted living home and can't attend matches, but she's a Trojans fan.

Junior Bibiana Candelas, a prized 6-foot-5 middle blocker from Mexico, bought into Haley's game plan during the recruiting process.

``He was really humble and he didn't say, 'I'm the 'SC coach. I was the national team coach.' He told me about the school and how much fun it would be,'' Candelas said. ``He knows a lot about volleyball. Every drill he does has meaning. He pushes you and he knows how hard to push. I'm glad I made the right decision.''

Haley was good at Texas, too. He won a national title in 1988, the first time a school not in California or Hawaii took the championship. And it wasn't a fluke. Texas did not lose a game in the NCAA Tournament, sweeping Hawaii in the final and UCLA in the semis. It took another seven years for a non-West school to win the national title when Nebraska defeated Texas for the 1995 championship.

Last year, USC was 35-0. The Trojans extended their winning streak to 52 matches, which ended against Illinois in September. Longtime Pepperdine men's coach Marv Dunphy, who also coached at the international level, has seen Haley's work firsthand. His daughter, Alex, is redshirting for Haley.

``I think the truly great champions in any sport are great over time,'' Dunphy said. ``Just about anybody can jump up and win something one time. It's very impressive that he's done it over time.''

He didn't have as much success on the international scene. He toured the country and played collegiate teams, hoping to gain support for the national team along the way. He said all teams cared about was beating the U.S. Penn State did it and he said he heard about it for two years. Then he opened tryouts and all that did was make players who didn't make the team bitter, according to Haley.

``I was woefully underprepared, although I didn't know it,'' he said. ``I wasn't prepared for the state of the program and the challenges. I didn't think we'd have to break things down as much as we did. I didn't like losing and we lost the first year. And I had two great ideas that never worked.''

His great ideas are working at USC, which is why he said he'll never go back to coaching a national team.

It's why he may join Stanford's Don Shaw as the only coaches to win four women's titles. And why he's having so much fun collecting pieces of championship courts.

``I hope to keep learning to do it better,'' Haley said. ``The biggest thing I've learned is being able to change, change the way you play a defense or changing certain attacks. That, for me, is the thing that sparked me to come back. Trying to win three in a row is pretty amazing.''

--Notes: USC outside hitter Keao Burdine and middle blocker Emily Adams were first-team selections to the American Volleyball Coaches Association All-America team. It was Adams' third consecutive selection to the team.

Middle blocker Bibiana Candelas was a third-team selection.

UCLA defensive specialist Chrissie Zartman was a second-team pick and teammate Krystal McFarland was a third-team selection.

Jill Painter, [phone]

jill.painter(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

photo, 2 boxes

Photo:

Mick Haley is 114-10 during his tenure as the USC women's volleyball coach. Haley also coached at Texas.

USC photo

Box:

(1) SPIKING SUCCESS

(2) NCAA WOMEN'S FINAL FOUR