Daily Bruin – Page 217

Associate head coach Rance Brown fosters diversity, brings passion to tennis court

For 15 years, Rance Brown commuted 66 miles from Laguna Beach.

The then-volunteer assistant coach for UCLA women’s tennis had to wake up at 5 a.m. every day to drive to campus, but spotting former Lakers star Kobe Bryant running along the Newport Coast Drive made the drive worth it.

“I made more money teaching in the private sector than I did (at UCLA) when I first started,” Brown said. “If Kobe can do it, I can do it, I used to tell myself.”

Brown worked at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel and Tennis Club as the director of tennis prior to taking the position at UCLA, coaching elite juniors for 20 years from 1977 to 1996. His players won over 25 national titles and he placed around 75 players in NCAA Division I tennis programs.

In 1993, Brown would come to Westwood to watch Keri Phebus – a UCLA commit who Brown had coached since she was 6 – where he first encountered current coach Stella Sampras Webster.

“That’s kind of how we met,” Sampras Webster said. “He had a lot of credibility coming in from the private sector.”

In 1995, Phebus became the second-ever woman to win both the NCAA singles and doubles titles in the same season. She garnered 144 singles wins over her four years, setting a program record for the most overall victories in singles play in UCLA history.

Phebus said Brown has a genuine love for the game and a passion for his players.

“(Brown) is one of those coaches that would give you the shirt off his back,” Phebus said. “If I needed to warm up, he’d be out there at 6 a.m. He believed in me, therefore I believed in myself.”

When then-head coach Bill Zaima retired in 1996 and Sampras Webster was promoted to head coach, she said it was a natural transition for Brown to become her assistant coach.

“I always felt that we were co-head coaches because of his knowledge of the game,” Sampras Webster said. “We had that respect level and he’s very loyal.”

In 2005, Sampras Webster took the fall off when she was giving birth to her twin girls, Sophia and Savannah. Brown took over as the temporary head coach and led the team in the fall season. He handled the recruiting for the following season and landed the top-ranked class in the nation.

With additional maternal responsibilities as a parent, Sampras Webster has since delegated scouting and recruiting responsibilities to the current associate head coach.

“I do send (Brown) out to scout because I think he enjoys that a lot,” Sampras Webster said. “Recruits, parents and coaches all really like (Brown). He builds relationships which is very valuable to have with the coaches out there.”

The Bruins have had a top-10 recruiting class in nine of the past 14 years. Brown said the successful recruiting has proven having college experience under players’ belts is beneficial before turning pro.

“Now we have a track record of players coming here for four years or two years,” Brown said. “I think that’s a big key – getting players that love tennis and want to be the best they can be.”

Former Bruin Jennifer Brady came to UCLA for two years before turning pro. She is currently No. 94 in the world, achieving a career-high of No. 60. Ena Shibahara, who played at the top of the singles lineup for UCLA the past two years, elected to turn pro in the fall.

Having only coached women’s collegiate tennis, Brown said he believes he can have more of an impact in women’s tennis due to the parity and intense competition between players on the men’s tour.

“On the women’s side, I feel you can choreograph a match and help players out there,” Brown said. “I’ve just had a lot more women transition from a college level to a professional level.”

Brown said with around half of the Bruins’ current roster hoping to play professionally someday, he embraces the commitment of developing the players that he brings in.

“Over the last 20 years, we have built this program with stability,” Brown said. “When a parent is sending their kid cross-country, I take that with a huge responsibility. The impact you can have on an 18-22 year old is tremendous.”

Through coaching, Brown is able to vicariously fulfill his childhood dream of going pro.

“I started playing tennis because I wanted to look and play like Arthur Ashe on TV,” Brown said. “So for me, to sit here at this university and in this office gives me great pride.”

Ashe – the first African-American to be ranked No. 1 in the world – also became the first African-American male to win the U.S. Open, Australian Open and Wimbledon.

Brown coached at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel and Tennis Club as the Director of Tennis before his time in Westwood. Throughout his coaching career, he has helped around 75 athletes to eventually play in Division I tennis programs. (Joe Akira/Daily Bruin staff)

As one of the first black students in his school district in Huntington Beach, California, in 1962, Brown is no stranger to the challenges minorities face.

“We celebrated Black History Month 365 days a year,” Brown said. “My parents raised us well. Walking out of the house each day, we knew we were loved and we knew there would be challenges.”

Last season, the Bruins had four African-American players consistently play in the lineup. Then-junior Ayan Broomfield, then-senior Terri Fleming, then-redshirt sophomore Jada Hart and then-junior Gabby Andrews led UCLA to a 23-6 record and a quarterfinal finish in the NCAA championships.

“You will not see that in the next 10 to 15 years in college tennis,” Brown said. “We did not try and go out to recruit for certain this or that. But is it nice to see African-American ladies come in here and do well? Hell yes. I just want to pull up as many people as I can on my journey and hopefully open some doors for them. I hope I can have a fraction of an impact of a Jackie Robinson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Rafer Johnson’s of the world.”

Brown was vital in recruiting Hart – UCLA’s current top singles player – who he has known since she was 12. He was the one to offer her a full scholarship to play for the Bruins.

“I have loved having (Brown) on the court,” Hart said. “I love talking to him in between changeovers and in between practice drills because we have our little inside jokes.”

Brown said that developing long-lasting relationships beyond the players’ stay in Westwood was something that was important to him.

Despite UCLA winning NCAA titles in 2008 and 2014, Brown said his fondest memories are bigger than tennis.

“My biggest joys are going to the weddings of players, them sending pictures and getting their Christmas cards up on my desk,” Brown said. “When my players come back and ask me to coach their kids – that’s what it’s all about.”

After retiring from professional tennis, Phebus is now married and has four kids – Ella, Addie, Jake and Charlie.

Guess who coaches them.

UCLA’s computer science curriculum fails to teach applicable skills in the field

One of UCLA’s greatest ironies is that its computer science curriculum is just a series of textbooks. So much for building the next Facebook.

Computer science students have long complained that their curriculum is not practical enough. Students raised these concerns with their department Wednesday during a department town hall co-hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery student group, pointing out they needed to learn more applicable skills relevant to the industry.

UCLA’s computer science department is largely based on 20th-century theoretical foundations of the field. Many of the courses the program offers focus on giving undergraduates a strong sense of the mathematical and conceptual foundations without much focus on the practical applications of the major. The department stresses teaching students the C programming language – an archaic code scheme developed in 1972.

The department expects students to obtain practical skills from their student-run extracurriculars, rather than teaching them. One of these extracurriculars is ACM, which helps students pick up machine learning, cybersecurity and application design.

In a world where companies hire students based on their ability to do things, it’s crucial that UCLA’s computer science education extends beyond mere theory. But students are the ones who need to claw their way into the competitive private sector, and they’ll need strong application skills to compete with other graduates.

Richard Korf, a professor and undergraduate vice chair of the computer science department, said the disparity between theory and practicality is intentional.

“A lot of our courses are theoretically based. We’re trying to train people for a career that lasts 40 years or more,” Korf said. “The question is, what do you teach people to become productive professionals in a field that’s changing very, very fast?”

His answer: teach students the theoretical foundations of the major.

But students give a different answer. They say more practical skills are what’s needed to cut it in the field. While a strong theoretical foundation is helpful during their careers, they still have to actually land a job first.

Korf disagrees, though.

“It’s like going to the gym and lifting weights. It’s not productive to get that weight from the ground up there, because no one needs it up there,” Korf said. “But what you are doing is trying to train your muscles to do that. And you do that by lifting weights.”

Korf’s analogy suggests that, just like lifting weights allows one to lift things outside of the gym, a strong theoretical foundation allows students to carry out practical tasks in the workforce. But that’s not really true. A purely theoretical education will leave students unprepared for practical tasks. Just like lifting weights won’t make the average student better at picking up a football and throwing a spiral pass, learning the theoretical foundation of computer science won’t grant students the practical skills necessary for landing a job at Google or Apple.

The department expects students to learn all the practical elements of computer science in their own student-run clubs. But the computer science workforce is a landscape that thrives off the practical skills of recent graduates. Projects and hands-on applications are precisely what employers look for in students seeking full-time positions or internships.

“I think joining a club is super important because we don’t get actual applied CS experience in classes,” said Smayra Ramesh, a first-year computer science student. “I joined CS because of how applicable it is. I’m not necessarily interested in pure back-end software development or theoretical CS.”

And while the department does offer several practical courses, they are hard to come by. That’s not enough for students like Ramesh and others who aren’t interested in an excessive theoretical education without matching practical courses.

If UCLA won’t teach students what computer science clubs are doing in its stead, the least it can do is offer more student-led classes focused on practicality.

“It would be nice to have a few more classes on the practical side. ACM is pushing the department to introduce more student-led classes that focus on that,” said Nathan Yang, the ACM external vice president and fourth-year computer science student. “If I was a second-year, those would have been helpful.”

Classes like those in the Engineering 96 series, which are lower-division, student-led courses, focus on teaching undergraduates hands-on skills. These types of classes not only help Bruins develop applicable skills, but also promote important collaboration among students.

Certainly, Korf has a point: Computer science is fast-moving, and it’s hard to constantly change curricula to match the pace of the industry. It thus makes sense that UCLA has a big focus on students mastering the fundamentals of computer science. But the department seems to be conflating understanding theory with understanding the entirety of the field. Teaching the basic science behind how computers operate teaches you just that; it doesn’t show you how to do things like combine virtual reality with network technology to build an innovative communication utility – one of the many things industries are investing heavily in today.

This misunderstanding is likely the reason the department has passively given students the task of educating themselves.

And so long as the department continues to do so, students will be forced to decide: Join a club to supplement their one-sided curriculum, or settle for never being able to program a robot to throw a spiral pass.

Tailored major could boost job prospects, graduation rates for student-athletes

Most people come to college first to get their degrees and second to pursue other activities. For student-athletes, it’s the other way around – and UCLA seems intent on keeping it that way.

At its most fundamental level, college exists to prepare students for productive postgraduation lives by teaching them skills they will use professionally.

At UCLA, future authors can hone their writing skills studying English or history. Budding businesspeople can develop their accounting knowledge in the business economics major. Burgeoning instrumentalists can perfect their musical abilities in the music performance program.

Aspiring sports stars? Probably a liberal arts degree that has nothing to do with their careers.

With 116 national championships, it is not a stretch to say UCLA possesses one of the most storied and robust athletic organizations in the NCAA. UCLA consistently recruits exceptionally talented athletes, each with unique experiences and abilities.

Student-athletes practice for dozens of hours every week and travel throughout the country for games, largely owing to UCLA Athletics’ strong national profile – and the large sums of money it generates. This means student-athletes often miss classes and don’t have much time to study. The effects of these constraints can be striking: In 2011, the gap between graduation rates for regularly attending male students and male basketball players in major conferences, for example, sat at 32.4 percent.

UCLA’s academic resources and opportunities fail to sufficiently accommodate athletes’ schedules and nurture the unique traits they have demonstrated for the greater part of their lives. It’s time for the university to consider introducing a course of study for student-athletes that focuses on careers in athletics.

The NCAA has made a big deal of improving student-athletes’ graduation rates, which has historically been an issue in collegiate athletics. But at schools in the so-called “Power Five” conferences, which includes the Pac-12, student-athlete graduation rates have always been especially poor. Within these conferences, the 69 percent student-athlete graduation rate still lags behind the 76 percent rate for all undergraduates at these schools.

These conferences are united by their public profiles. They feature the most-viewed games, and their athletics departments generate hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s alarming that the most integral component of these programs – the athletes, who are supposedly being compensated for their labor with an education – are often given little time to focus on completing their degrees or receive them at all.

Shana Wilson, a senior associate athletic director, said UCLA’s rigorous academic standards are factored in when coaches determine which athletes to recruit.

“Once they are enrolled in school, like all students on campus, student-athletes have access to college academic counseling, academic support, student-athlete development and student services,” Wilson said.

But even the best tutors cannot compensate for the sheer amount of time and energy athletes devote to participating in their sport and improving the university’s brand. Even UCLA Athletics’ newly announced $35-million study center is merely an expensive Band-Aid covering up a far more fundamental problem. Universities and the NCAA claim the education student-athletes receive is fair compensation for their efforts on the field, yet fail to acknowledge that the rigorous demands of college athletics often severely cut short players’ academic experiences.

Ensuring all students are able to derive value from a UCLA education should be a top priority for the university. If a college degree is to be student-athletes’ only form of compensation, it seems only fair that UCLA strives to offer them the chance to complete coursework that is relevant to their field – literally.

A template for what an athletics-based academic program might look like is the music performance major. Instrumentalists, much like athletes, possess a very specialized skill set that allows them to enter professional fields more traditional students don’t. Students in the program take classes almost exclusively geared toward music, and there is a heavy emphasis on live performance and critique. Since UCLA is clearly willing to offer a major that caters to a very specific profession, there is little reason why there shouldn’t be a similar program for student-athletes seeking to learn the intricacies of athletics – personal finance, consulting, coaching and so on.

Andrew Larkin, an assistant men’s golf coach at UCLA, said he believes the introduction of a specialized course of study for athletes would be beneficial.

“I personally believe it would be better coming from the NCAA and required through athletic departments rather than individual universities,” Larkin said.

It’s also worth considering that an overwhelming number of student-athletes at UCLA will not become professional athletes after college. A degree is supposed to offer a sort of insurance athletes can fall back on if their professional aspirations are not realized. Yet over a quarter of Power Five college athletes do not even graduate.

Admittedly, there have been past incidents that question the legitimacy of an athletics-based academic program. Take the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for instance, where athletes were given grades they had demonstrably not earned, showing just how an improperly supervised athletics departments can permit academic misconduct.

But if anything, this scandal should raise serious questions about the academic environment student-athletes are forced into. If universities are truly recruiting athletes that are prepared on paper for their academic programs, failures such as UNC’s indicate the mishandling of student-athletes’ educations and that the educational paradigm for athletes is unsustainable.

Universities already go through painstaking efforts to ensure student-athletes perform on the field. It’s about time they gave them a diploma to help them off it too.

Budding Los Angeles: Agnetix’s innovative lights illuminate role of technology in cannabis cultivation

Thirty years ago, buying cannabis was difficult, expensive and illegal. Buying cannabis in 2019 is somewhere between picking up a prescription from a pharmacy and buying beer from a liquor store. Join columnist John Tudhope each week as he visits cannabis companies in Los Angeles and discusses the budding industry.

Most people who visited my room wouldn’t have noticed the small cardboard box in the corner. I had just moved away to college and decided to grow pot in my shared room – don’t worry, it was legal and not prohibited by the cooperative dorm I live in off-campus.

My roommates didn’t mind this project, but would likely have been more enthusiastic if it produced a quality smoke. Instead, my first plant, sustained by a small fluorescent lightbulb, looked lanky, smelled like grass and tasted like chemicals.

There is a key difference between my poor attempt at cultivation and a plant that produces top-shelf cannabis buds: technology. The most advanced cultivation operations today use plant strains bred to perfection, provide an ideal ratio of water, lights and nutrients, and are often housed indoors in a climate-controlled environment.

This week I spoke with Agnetix, a company that engineers water-cooled LED lights utilized at indoor grows such as The Cure Company’s growing facility, and was featured at a cannabis networking event I attended recently. Strong lighting is one of many essential aspects in cultivating quality marijuana, and in a market as competitive as California’s, growers must provide the most meticulously grown products to succeed.

In any indoor agriculture operation, growers use water and electricity to produce quality cannabis. The sheer amount of resources needed to grow cannabis became clear to me when I visited The Cure Company’s 30,000-square-foot growing facility. I observed innumerable barrels of nutrients, pipes, hoses and wires.

Aside from lights, indoor cultivation businesses can use automatic watering and fertilization systems, dehumidifiers, fans and other hardware to physically house the plants. The Cure Company housed the highest level of technology – no pun intended. A few of the other cannabis businesses I have visited also mentioned that outfitting their factory with the necessary power supply has been one of the most costly and essential aspects of their growth.

Lighting contributes to cultivation costs in a few ways, said Troy Robson, the business development manager at Agnetix. Lights need electricity to operate and create heat, which in turn creates the need for an air conditioning system to keep the environment from overheating. Robson said an ideal light should shine as bright as possible while using minimal electricity and wasting the least amount of heat energy.

Robson said the difference between LED lights and traditional growing lights is similar to the difference between traditional lightbulbs and energy-efficient lightbulbs. He said the reason metal halide lights are still more common is that LED lights generally lack the same brightness.

Robson said LEDs make up only about 20 percent of indoor agriculture light arrays and claims that in the next five years, as LED technology improves and closes the gap with traditional lighting, Agnetix is positioned to become a hundred-million-dollar company.

When I saw a demonstration of their A3 light in December at the Southern California Cannabis Business Investment Group meetup, a cannabis networking night, Agnetix had attendees touch the blinding surface of the light array and see that it wasn’t warm. Every time the light switched, my reaction was a combination of interest in the technology and annoyance that the incredibly strong LEDs were flooding my face with light.

After seeing grow lights up close and at a cultivation facility, Agnetix was interesting to learn about for one main reason – it is just one of the massive group of businesses involved in cannabis that aren’t directly involved in the seed-to-sale supply chain. When you hear people speculating about the massive future of cannabis, they aren’t only talking about the transactions that happen at a dispensary – they are talking about the industry beyond the plant itself.

When I asked Robson if Agnetix’s technology is available for home growers, he said no. Until then, or until I learn a little more about botany, I’ll stick to buying weed.

Alumna’s architecture integrates aesthetics with practical design

Architect Alice Fung doesn’t just design buildings; she tries to make life better for others through her work.

The UCLA alumna is a practicing architect at Fung+Blatt Architects, a firm she founded with her husband, Michael Blatt. She said the business pushes the boundaries of structural architecture by combining artwork and machines to enhance aesthetic beauty and practicality. Fung presented a lecture at UCLA’s Perloff Hall on Monday, covering her efforts to create structures that ease living and appeal to the senses.

“Our goal is to combine physical structure and human experience, finding an overlap in practicality,” Fung said. “We try to elevate everyday experiences.”

In the context of modern architecture, Fung said, beauty can often impede practicality. However, Fung+Blatt fuses the two concepts together by analyzing patterns of human interaction and designing buildings accordingly.

If a client hosts frequent social gatherings in a specific area of their home, Fung+Blatt will use fixtures to enhance these occasions. For example, the director of development and communications at Sequoyah School, Elena Phleger, said raw timber and brick were used to simulate the home aesthetic to accomplish Fung’s goal of expanding the school. Phleger said the design for the K-8 school was clean and simple, yet practical because it felt safe for the students, like a home.

“(Fung and Blatt) are remarkable architects. They always had the school’s mission at heart,” Phleger said. “They had extraordinary vision, technical expertise and the determination to make the buildings come to life.”

After passing the school many times on her commute, Fung+Blatt client Michelle Huneven said she began to notice Sequoyah’s architecture because of its use of open space, sleek glass panels and an overall striking modern style. Upon observing the school, she said she was inspired to remodel her own home, enlisting Fung’s services.

“I could tell her architecture was very modern and clean, but not sterile,” Huneven said. “In fact, it was very inviting, not as cold and inhuman as modern architecture can be.”

Huneven said Fung’s characteristic style shone through in the redesign of her kitchen. Fung learned that Huneven liked to host social events in the kitchen, so she made the room more practical for entertaining, Huneven said. She added a built-in sofa, little openings in the walls so people can talk room-to-room, and a staircase masking the end of a bookshelf to carry out this goal.

Huneven said Fung also incorporated the other essential aspect of her work into her kitchen: artistic beauty. She expressed her contempt for kitchen hoods to Fung before she began designing the kitchen. Despite Huneven’s dislike for the mechanical device, Fung designed one with patterns of teal and light gray that ultimately made it a focal point of the kitchen, Huneven said.

Additionally, Huneven said Fung worked to make the lighting, tiles and color in the kitchen highlight the aesthetic of the entire house. Similar to the kitchen, Fung designed tile artwork outside of Huneven’s house with subtle colors to implement more artistic beauty in the house.

Teaching has recently inspired Fung’s work, she said. Fung has been building her career in education by teaching at the USC Roski School of Art and Design, sharing with her students her practical style. Fung said this was her ultimate goal: to accentuate and ease her clients’ specific lifestyles.

“We look for patterns in order to understand our world, to find order out of chaos,” Fung said. “I think art and architecture in a sense are about revealing underlying order.”

MOCA curates annual student art exhibit featuring diverse subjects and styles

Personal reflection and contemporary conversation inspired 19 art students to give a physical form to societal debates.

Bennett Simpson, the senior curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, chose works from a pool of nearly 100 applicants for the UCLA Department of Art’s annual undergraduate exhibition. The exhibition, located in the Broad Art Center’s New Wight Gallery, is open until Thursday. Malaya Johnson, a second-year art student and a featured artist, said the exhibition doesn’t subscribe to a certain theme, but rather focuses on the style of each individual artist while commenting on social topics.

“I think everyone is making very critical work and it’s nice to see how much love and attention they all put into it,” Johnson said. “A lot of the work helps you become a better thinker, and I think anyone can gain something out of that.”

The Juried Exhibition is Johnson’s first show, and she is excited to see how students interact with the dialogue her piece is meant to inspire, she said. She crafted a sculpture titled “Untitled (or, Burnt Sacrifice)” which takes the form of an altar with pill bottles used as candles, and said the piece is meant to be an honest work that explores the intersection between religion and mental health. Johnson said the inner turmoil caused by both religion and mental health allowed her to observe parallels between the two. The ritualistic practices found in religion and the act of taking a pill daily are both recurring processes of healing that aren’t typically associated with one another, she said.

Jack Garell, a second-year art student, submitted a photograph of himself on a couch, wrapped in a poncho of recycled plastic materials, as part of the exhibition. The photograph is originally from a series of three pieces entitled “Plastic People,” which is meant to remind onlookers that everyday use of plastic is something everyone should remain aware of and work to limit. Although Garell began photographing eight years ago, he said his interactions with accomplished photography professors and assignments in an introductory film class have encouraged him to contemplate why he photographs and the relevance behind each of his works.

“(The photograph) is about our mindless use of plastic and how we don’t put a lot of conscious thought into how we’re using it. I wanted to do a self-portrait to include myself in that conversation because I feel like sometimes people leave themselves out or talk about society objectively, but I’m part of the issue,” Garell said. “I’m contributing to that consumer culture.”

Fourth-year art student Gozie Ojini has a sculpture entitled “Portal” in the exhibition, created from a beaded curtain hung from a walk-through metal detector. The beads of the curtain spell out quotes from the various perspectives of fellow students, faculty and district attorneys concerning the use of metal detectors in schools and the psychological effects they have on students. He said he hopes seeing familiar objects, such as a metal detector, in a gallery context will shift people’s perspectives on their use of the objects outside an artistic setting. While the metal detector functions properly, it will remain unplugged during the exhibition due to the legal codes of the gallery space.

Despite the fact that his sculpture will not function at the level he wanted, Ojini said he still encourages students to visit the gallery and contribute to the discussion each featured piece confronts. Johnson said one of an artist’s greatest fears is that they are shouting into an empty void, but participation in the exhibition offers her an opportunity to open a dialogue about her piece with the public. Garell said it is important for people to see what kind of art students are making now and the different ways in which they’ve manifested their ideas in relation to contemporary issues.

“We’re trying to tackle issues here that we feel are important,” Ojini said. “We’re trying to bridge the gap between people who think art is this elitist thing, but what we’re actually trying to do is communicate.”

Simpson declined to comment.

The Quad: Reflecting on legacy of UCLA’s first Japanese-American varsity baseball player

Kiyoshi Patrick Okura was a varsity athlete before World War II.

But afterward, he became a civil rights leader.

With a number of laws put in place to create anti-Japanese and anti-Asian-American sentiment at the time, Okura struggled with both professional and athletic opportunities throughout his lifetime – the beginning of World War II only put him at a further disadvantage.

Okura was born in Los Angeles in 1911 and graduated from UCLA in 1933 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Two years later, he became the first Asian-American to graduate with a master’s degree in psychology at UCLA.

Okura faced adversity in school and sports even before anti-Japanese sentiment reached its peak in the U.S.

In a book titled, “Victory Without Swords,” Robert B. Kugel wrote that while Okura was attending UCLA, the school’s residential restrictions made it so Japanese-American students could not live in close proximity to the school.

“Okura was not allowed to live in the area where the university was located,” Kugel wrote. “He had to live elsewhere and to hitch-hike eight miles to school every day.”

During Okura’s time at UCLA, he founded the Japanese American Bruins Club along with several other Japanese-Americans. The club pulled together the few Japanese-American students on campus and provided them the opportunity to be around a group of people who may have similar cultural traits, that was hard to find on a campus with few Asian student representation.

With little Asian student representation, there was a smaller percentage of minorities who participated in sports. Even before World War II prejudices against minorities were prevalent, concrete references of Okura’s time with UCLA baseball are inconsistent.

Okura was the first Japanese-American to play on UCLA’s varsity baseball team and was a member of the Blue “C” Society that was known as the Honorary Major Sport Letterman Organization. Blue “C” Society consisted of only five varsity sports: football, basketball, baseball, track and tennis. The most notable member of this society is Jackie Robinson who was UCLA’s first four-sport letter winner.

Okura played as a second baseman in 1929-1930, but he broke his arm in the following year and was not able to play that season. However, he returned to play in 1932-1933. There are limited records of Okura’s baseball statistics but they can be found within the archive at UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center Library and Reading Room.

Although Okura was part of the Blue “C” Society since his freshman year, a few yearbooks did not include his name. Captions under varsity photos and the Blue “C” Society page often disregarded his participation.

Shortly after graduation, Okura took up a job at the LA City Civil Service, administering qualification exams for the city. When World War II came around, he was eventually accused of being an Irish spy, because his legal name was inaccurately recorded as “O’kura.” He was shortly thereafter accused of being unfair in the process of the examinations.

“(The government believed) he had infiltrated the Civil Service Department with Japanese-Americans and that his plan was for them to take over the department,” Kugel wrote.

After a forced resignation, Okura and his wife Lily Arikawa were sent to the Santa Anita racetrack in 1941, a relocation center where Japanese people would then be separated into different internment camps. Luckily for Okura, he was able to find work as a psychologist by Father Flanagan at Boys Town, a home for boys in Omaha. This opportunity would take him and his wife out of the relocation center and into a state where they could live in a house and work regular jobs.

“He responded to adversity by going into a field of work that seeks to understand and to heal. He went into psychology and mental health,” Kugel said. “He went into a field that calls upon one to give to others.”

Okura saw his work as a psychologist as an opportunity to engage friends and family and help patients feel less alienated and more comfortable with their mental illnesses.

Later on in his life, he was involved with community organizations and received several awards. He was the executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League in LA in 1962, the oldest and largest Asian-American civil rights organization. Among other accolades and achievements, Okura also served as the national president of the League from 1962-1964 and the director of the National Institute of Mental Health in 1971.

Combining his $20,000 reparations with his wife’s from the U.S. government by the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, they funded the Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation to advance human services within the health field. They later founded the National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse.

Librarian and archivist Marjorie Lee, who is in charge of the Okura collection at the UCLA Asian American Library Studies Center and Reading Room, said Okura was an important figure in the Japanese-American community because of his devotion to service. She added that his determination to create a better environment for Japanese-Americans also led to his founding of the Japan-America Student Conference – a student-led exchange program where students from the U.S. and Japan study and analyze U.S.-Japanese relations.

The Day of Remembrance on Feb. 19 memorializes the Japanese community affected by the war. Okura pulled the Japanese-American community together during this time when there was little advocacy for Asian people in the mental health field.

As a student-athlete who faced racial discrimination and was interned during World War II, Lee said Okura encapsulated leadership and dedication with a legacy to be remembered.

“(Okura) dedicated his life to mental health and the Japanese community,” Lee said. “The war, the internment camps, the discrimination, he wanted to prove that none of those obstacles would discourage him. (Okura) didn’t want to get revenge, it was to get even, and that’s just what he did.”

Email Murakami at mmurakami@dailybruin.com