FOLLOWING THE LEADER

The temperature was in the low 90s, making it the sort of morning when the best thing to do was to find some shade and kick back.

Not Carla Overbeck. Not the captain of the U.S. Women’s World Cup team that plays China on Saturday at the Rose Bowl with a world championship on the line.

There she was Tuesday morning, in sunglasses, shorts and a tank top, leading a pack of teammates on a run around the college playing fields in Claremont.

Just for the fun of it. Just to work up a sweat. Just to avoid sitting around, watching the reserves play a pickup game.

“I think we decided today when we went on our little jog that Carla would be a hell of a Marine Corps captain,” Brandi Chastain said. “Because as caring and as wholesome and as concerned for her son, Jackson, as she is, she’s one hard woman.

“She’s tough. She really gets down and gets dirty.”

Overbeck, 31, has a world championship and an Olympic gold medal in her collection and is only 90 minutes or so away from another world title. So she’s quite happy to let Mia Hamm’s husband be the Marine--he’s a helicopter pilot--while she sticks to being one of the finest defenders women’s soccer has to offer.

In any case, the military mind doesn’t suit her.

“She said she would have a hard time taking somebody yelling in her face because she would just want to give it right back to them,” Chastain said.

“And that’s a huge positive for our team. You look at her on the field and she seems so calm and so collected, as if nothing would ever bother her. But, boy, she’s just waiting for that chance to just bust out and nail someone.”

And there you have one side of Carla Werden Overbeck.

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To find the other side, drop the last name and go back to her childhood. She was Carla Werden in those days, but her dad called her “Termite.”

“It was probably just because I was this little twig of a kid, skinny legs, skinny arms and just kind of small,” she said. “I think that’s probably where he got it. I don’t know.”

Saturday’s game is a sort of homecoming for Overbeck. She was born only a few long goal kicks from the Rose Bowl, at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, and grew up in San Marino.

The family moved to Texas when she was not yet 4, but the Southern California connection remained strong.

“My grandmother owned a beach house in Balboa [Newport Beach], so we would come and spend every summer there,” she said. “Like the entire summer, we’d just live in this beach house on the peninsula. It was a cute little red house, right on D Street, down by the Wedge, kinda.

“It was the greatest thing. We were just beach bums in the summer and then we’d go back to Texas for school.”

School was Richardson High near Dallas. There, she was a midfielder on the soccer team, a setter and spiker on the volleyball team and a point guard on the basketball team. If she’d been allowed to go out for football, she would probably have made that team too.

“I have two older brothers and an older sister, and they beat up on me all the time,” Overbeck said, explaining where the tough-as-nails attitude comes from. “I would have to fight back.

“I played football with them and soccer with them and against them. I was just the typical little sister, wanting to be around them all the time and them not wanting me around.”

All those summers by the sea helped when she enrolled at North Carolina because Anson Dorrance, the Tar Heels’ and then U.S. national team coach, immediately threw her in at the deep end.

“As a freshman, usually you come in and get accustomed to the play and to the higher level and to the school and everything,” Overbeck said. “But because their whole defense had graduated, I had to step in and start right away.

“They had just lost the national championship the year before and they were determined not to let that happen again.”

The Tar Heels didn’t, at least not while Overbeck was anchoring the back line. They won four consecutive NCAA titles.

Her hard tackling, her ability to read the game and her leadership qualities made it inevitable that she would be called to the national team and she was, playing her first game, against Japan, on June 1, 1988, three weeks after her 20th birthday.

She has been a starter ever since.

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“Carla is the consummate professional and the consummate leader. On any team I was ever building, I’d start with Carla Overbeck.”

Lauren Gregg was talking. The U.S. team’s assistant coach, herself a former UNC and U.S. national team player, was seated in the shade at the team’s practice site in Claremont--no cadence runs for the coaches--trying to describe Overbeck’s role.

“Her leadership is central to this team’s success,” she said. “It’s been at the core of establishing our culture, our tradition of fitness, our training mentality, our heart and our competitive fury. She embodies all those things. She’s sort of the heart and pulse of this team.”

Overbeck, who has played in 148 games for the national team, can’t remember when she was named captain. But it’s a role she has filled to perfection for at least half a dozen years.

“She has a great sense of when to get on people and when to pick people up,” Gregg said. “She has a wonderful way of getting the best out of everybody. Her timing is impeccable, in terms of when to give feedback to players.

“When we’re bringing in young players, she’s one of the first people to make them feel comfortable because she knows confidence and comfort level usually factor into getting the most out of somebody.”

Goalkeeper Briana Scurry can attest to that.

“It’s awesome to have Carla in front of me,” she said. “She has this uncanny calming effect on people. The way she speaks to you, the way she directs you.

“When she tells me I’ve done a good job I can really honestly feel that she means it. It makes me feel good. A lot of people can pat you on the back, but when Carla pats you on the back that means something special.

“I had my first game in Portugal [in 1994] and she came up to me right before the game and patted me on my shoulder and said, ‘You deserve to be here.’

“I was a little nervous, obviously, wondering, ‘Am I going to be able to handle this?’ But she really calmed me down and made me feel comfortable. That meant a lot to me and I’ll never forget that.”

These days, 19-year-old defender Lorrie Fair of Los Altos, Calif., is one of the youngsters being groomed. Already, she has come off the bench to play well in several of the World Cup games.

“She settles everybody down,” Fair said of Overbeck. “Obviously, it’s hard to come into this team when you’re young.

“When I was 17 and [in] my first training camp, she introduced herself. But it was not like she just said, ‘Hi, I’m Carla,’ and then walked away. She said, ‘Hi, I’m Carla. Is there anything you need?’

“She’s kind of like team mom. She’s more like someone we look to for help, for support.”

Ah, yes, the team mom. Overbeck and fellow defender Joy Fawcett have seen enough of those “soccer mom” stories to last a lifetime.

But the fact that Overbeck now is raising a 1 1/2-year-old son, Jackson, only adds to the responsibilities she is carrying.

Her husband, Greg, is part-owner of several restaurants in Chapel Hill, N.C., where the family lives. They met in China when he was one of the U.S. team chefs and she was a soon-to-be world champion.

Now, she is an assistant coach at Duke and, if China can be overcome, once again a world champion.

“She’s clearly one of the best defenders in the world,” Gregg said. “She’s been anchoring the success of this team for the last decade.”

Said U.S. Coach Tony DiCicco, “We’re always a better team when she’s on the field.”

She’ll be on the field Saturday. Look out for No. 4. China certainly will.

SATURDAY

At Rose Bowl Championship: United States vs. China, 12:45 p.m. Channel 7

Third place: Brazil vs. Norway, 10:15 a.m.

FIRST FAN: President Clinton will extend a cross-country trip and attend the title game of the Women’s World Cup. Page 8