By BILL O’REAR
Tribune-Herald sports editor
For years, Elroy Osorio has proudly watched the success of the University of Hawaii at Hilo women’s volleyball teams. Now, he’d like to see the Vulcans add men’s volleyball as a sport.
Osorio has started a 10,000-signature petition seeking to show community interest in the sport and plans to present the petition to UHH athletic director Dexter Irvin. On Tuesday, he watched as fans signed the document at Afook-Chinen Civic Auditorium during the Haili Volleyball Tournament.
“We’ve got over 1,000 signatures,” a smiling Osorio said. “I don’t know if we can get 10,000. But for the first time in 14 years, UHH seems interested in possibly adding men’s volleyball as a club sport.”
Osorio said he spoke with Irvin, in his third year as the UHH AD, about men’s volleyball and got a positive response.
“For years, we’ve watched our boys go away and some not even get a chance to play college volleyball,” Osorio said. “A few were able to play Division I volleyball, but for a lot of the others who couldn’t, they could’ve been very competitive in Division II volleyball.
“If you UHH had a men’s volleyball team, they could be competitive and I think draw fans.”
Osorio, a retired USAVB official, was told he would need to raise about $50,000 to fund the first year of a Vulcans men’s volleyball club team. Most of the money would go toward inter-island travel to play on Oahu. The UHH women’s squad, he said, has an annual budget of $150,000 with a large chunk going to mainland and inter-island travel to play in the Pacific West Conference.
“If we could just get it started on the club level first, it might eventually develop into a conference sport,” Osorio said. “Dexter said let’s take a look at it regardless if BYU-Hawaii, Chaminade and Hawaii Pacific jump on the idea, too. He said if we can establish it at UHH, then let’s give it a try and see what happens.”
The PacWest currently has 10 schools — and only one, Cal Baptist, has a men’s volleyball team. However, four new schools — Azusa Pacific, Fresno Pacific, Holy Names University and Point Loma Nazarene — will join the conference next year and of those Holy Names has a men’s volleyball team.
It takes six schools to form a conference schedule and if UHH, BYUH, Chaminade and HPU sponsored men’s volleyball club teams to go along with Cal Baptist and Holy Names, the potential for the addition of the new sport becomes more viable.
“We understand that we would have to raise $50,000 to get it started on the club level,” Osorio said. “But if we could pull it off, it would give a lot of our talented boys a chance to stay home and play at the college level. And at Division II, they could be very good.”
