Arundell Will Fall In to the Long Gray Line : Fillmore Star Raised Some Eyebrows With Her Commitment to West Point

College prep, as practiced by Jamie Arundell of Fillmore High:-- Practice pushups and sit-ups.

-- Sweat out two-mile runs through the sun-drenched orange orchards that surround her Fillmore home.

-- Prepare for long hikes loaded down with a rifle, camping gear, food, water--30 pounds of equipment in all.

-- Adjust mindset for an 0530 hour (5:30 a.m.) wake-up call each morning, arduous physical challenges and more than likely a plentiful dose of being yelled at, harangued and hazed.

Tennnn- hut!

Come June 28, Arundell will begin boot camp--a six-week basic training course in upstate New York. While her fellow high school graduates get beach parties, Arundell gets Beast Barracks, as the course is not-so-affectionately known. Her fellow college freshmen may join fraternities or sororities. Arundell will trudge through marching drills with her company.

There is an upshot to all the sacrifice, of course. Next summer, Arundell can learn to drive a tank. Or fire a bazooka.

How apropos. Arundell, the second-leading basketball scorer in the state and last year’s Frontier League softball player of the year, dropped a bombshell when she decided to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Although she has been a three-sport standout at Fillmore, she will play only basketball for Army.

“All kinds of my friends are like, ‘You’ve got to party in college; they’re the best years of your life!’ ” she says. “And even some teachers, they’re like, ‘Why would you want to do that? There’s so much discrimination and hazing.’ ”

And if there is? “You have to sacrifice a little bit,” she says.

Plenty of sacrifice awaits Arundell, along with an abundance of discipline, challenges and the requisite four years of military service after graduation, plus one year for each year the army pays for her postgraduate education.

“Everybody says, ‘You’re going to be there forever,’ ” she says.

But she seems undaunted by the burden she is about to shoulder, instead choosing to focus on the opportunities available to her, the security and rigid structure she wants and is guaranteed at West Point.

The choice may not have been applauded by some of her peers and teachers, but Arundell has learned selective listening.

“At first when they started giving me negative feedback, I listened to them, but now I don’t because I know what I’m getting into,” she says. “They don’t really know a lot about it, being from the West Coast.”

Neither did she, until this year. West Point seemed an unlikely place for Arundell, a talented athlete in softball, basketball and volleyball, who received recruiting letters from more than 50 colleges such as Arizona State, Pepperdine, Santa Clara, Princeton and Dartmouth. “At first, when I started getting letters from the Army, I threw them away,” she says. “I said, ‘I don’t want to go to the Army!”

That was more than a year ago.

Now she sits in her living room overlooking the sleepy town where she was born--a flat, hot, quiet place at the base of San Cayetano mountain--and she sounds like a recruiting brochure for West Point.

“The view from the Hudson was just gorgeous,” she says. “And all the history and the statues of MacArthur and Eisenhower.”

She wants to be a doctor, she says. She recalls as inspiration her young cousin, Ryan Thorn, born three months prematurely in 1988. The infant weighed 2 pounds, 3 ounces, had a weak heart and wasn’t expected to live. But after successful surgery, he recovered and “It was like a miracle,” she says.

“I’d have my med school all paid for--it just depended on where I got accepted--and afterward I’d work in a military hospital. I’d be doing my job and I’d have security and a lot of benefits. I’ve heard of a lot of students who have graduated from college and can’t find jobs and I say, ‘Gee I don’t want to go through that.’ ”

Her ability to plan for the future is impressive, almost as striking as her athletic accomplishments.

The 6-foot-1 basketball center was a Times’ All-Ventura County selection as a junior and senior, and averaged 29.4 points per game her senior year, the second-highest mark in the state. She averaged 11 rebounds and was the Tri-Valley League most valuable player.

In softball, she has pitched three no-hitters this season and is 8-1 with an 0.92 earned-run average. She is hitting .391 and will assuredly be selected all-league for the third consecutive season, matching her tally in basketball and volleyball.

Who would have guessed that such a standout was once a scrub in junior high?

“In seventh grade I think I scored one point the whole year,” she says.

“She was awful small,” recalls her father, Jim Arundell.

But Arundell improved as a freshman, and after averaging more than 20 points per game as a sophomore, played on the Ventura/Santa Barbara County Sharks, a traveling all-star team.

The tough competition improved her game rapidly and she received more exposure than by playing solely at Fillmore, a small school hidden away between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

Army basketball Coach Lynn Chiviaro and her assistant, Barbara Affeldt, attended a summer league game in 1991 and began an intense recruiting effort that appealed to her education-minded parents, both teachers at Piru Elementary School.

Affeldt visited the Arundells’ home and first convinced Arundell’s parents. Their daughter was a tougher sell, but Affeldt was persistent and Arundell became intrigued by the security, the opportunities, the guarantees. She was swayed by personal touches, like Affeldt asking Jim to hold the phone up so she could listen to Arundell play the piano.

Before visiting West Point, Arundell took a trip to Princeton in November. A straight arrow shot from a no-nonsense family bow, Arundell was turned off by the easy living she perceived.

“I liked it a lot, but somehow I fit in better at West Point,” she says. “Princeton was a lot of rich kids and they party all the time, too. That’s all they were doing. It wasn’t as disciplined and I thought that maybe I would, I don’t know, screw around.

“There was too much free time and too many distractions.”

Jim agreed.

“They took her to clubs and stuff,” he says. “She was underage and she still got into these clubs. It wasn’t the type of thing she wanted to get involved in.”

One week later, she visited West Point, set along the banks of the Hudson River about 50 miles north of New York City. She was sold, so she sent the word over there. Arundell was Army-bound.

She passed the physical test required of applicants: A flexed arm hang, a basketball throw, a shuttle run and a standing broad jump. Next she secured an appointment from her congressman.

Then she began to doubt.

“At first I really did, a lot,” she says. “I didn’t know if I was making the right decision. But every time I started to doubt my decision, my dad told me how much I was going to benefit from West Point and that I shouldn’t doubt it.

Ironically, her father encouraged her even though he was unhappy in his stint as an aviation electrician in the Marine Corps in 1960-64.

“I wanted to have my freedom and do my own thing,” Jim says. “I didn’t really like it while I was in it. But I think I’d be more worried if she was going to another college. I just feel like they’re going to take care of her.”

Affeldt has assured the Arundells of that.

“Every week I talked to my coach,” Jamie says. “They’re going to be so supportive and I know I’m never going to be alone.”

The family all chimes in and lists the school’s many selling points: the prestige, small class size, tutors who travel with the team and the rabid enthusiasm for women’s basketball that has cadets lining the streets when the team bus leaves on a road trip.

And it is all paid for by the government. Arundell said that her undergraduate and graduate education through the Army is the equivalent of a $228,000 scholarship.

But there are sticking points as well.

“Sometimes I have mixed feelings,” Diane says. “I’m worried about how intense it’s going to be. And she only gets 30 days off in the summer and two weeks at Christmas. The (lack of) time home is the biggest negative.”

If the Cadets beat Navy, team members get a weekend leave. But a weekend won’t be time enough to return on that dirt road with the well-worn tire ruts that leads to the house in Fillmore.

Amid the acre and a half of orange, avocado and apricot trees sits an old red tractor, which still works. A rusty crimson pickup truck a few yards away doesn’t. In the nearby driveway is the basketball hoop Arundell practiced on all her life. It’s an idyllic scene that she won’t get to see too often.

But her choice requires a multitude of sacrifices.

Soon she will be forced to salute nearly everyone she sees, and to wear a different uniform every day--to be determined each morning.

“I’ll probably wear the wrong one,” she says with a laugh. “That’s what my friends say, that I’ll be running out there going, ‘Wait! Wait!’ With my shoes in my hands.”