LOCAL WATCH: BETHEA DELIVERS FORMER RB NOW DB AT CAL.Byline: Lee Barnathan Staff Writer The transformation of James Bethea from flight risk to ``killer'' continues at Cal. Bethea was a top-notch running back for Cleveland High in Reseda, where he excelled in escaping the grasps of defenders bent on Adj. 1. bent on - fixed in your purpose; "bent on going to the theater"; "dead set against intervening"; "out to win every event" bent, dead set, out to bringing him down. Now, as a Cal freshmen cornerback, he's learning the other side of things, how to develop a hard-hitting mentality. He's coming along fine, averaging 20-25 plays a game. So far, he has eight unassisted tackles, two assisted tackles and one fumble recovery for the Bears heading into this afternoon's Pac-10 contest with USC An abbreviation for U.S. Code. at the Coliseum Coliseum: see Colosseum. . This isn't to say he's a lean, mean, hitting machine. He shows flashes of his former self on kickoff returns. His first, against Fresno State, went 50 yards, and he's second in the conference with an average return of 20.7 yards. But it's the defense Cal wants from him. ``Cal is the `Hit Squad hit squad n. Slang 1. A squad or team of hired executioners, as one organized for carrying out a political assassination. 2. A group of political terrorists. Noun 1. ,' '' he said. ``That's what they do. . . . It's not an option. You have to come downhill and strike somebody as hard as you can. . . . It's a little challenging. You've almost got to be a killer. You've got to hit. On offense, I don't want to get hit.'' Cal cornerbacks coach Al Simmons recruited Bethea out of Cleveland knowing he was a running back. Simmons said he saw Bethea play 12 downs on defense and saw the 5-foot-11, 190-pounder wasn't afraid to get in and hit someone. Simmons also liked Bethea's athleticism, hips and footwork. ``He's very good technically and very smart,'' Simmons said. ``We knew he could play right away. You look at the quickness, how good his feet are, if he can stop on a dime.'' Bethea can do those things. Hitting, however, isn't his forte An application development system for enterprise client/server environments from Sun. It was folded into the Sun Studio compiler and tool suite, which is based on the open source Netbeans IDE. . He knows this because in practice, players tell him, ``Don't be a wimp, hit somebody.'' He sees some improvement. Against UCLA UCLA University of California at Los Angeles UCLA University Center for Learning Assistance (Illinois State University) UCLA University of Carrollton, TX and Lower Addison, TX , he blocked out everything and put two big hits on Brian Poli-Dixon. For a brief moment, Bethea was the Terminator (1) A character that ends a string of alphanumeric characters. (2) A hardware component that is connected to the last peripheral device in a series or the last node in a network. , finding the receiver in his range, setting his sights and putting his body into the victim. CAPTION(S): photo Photo: Cal freshman James Bethea has made the switch from running back at Cleveland High to hard-hitting cornerback in college. Special to the Daily News |
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