Unintended consequences sometimes get a bad rap. Collateral damage in bombing, changing tax laws for one group hurts another group, these kind of things happen all the time.
But sometimes there’s a virtue hidden inside an unintended consequence, like when Hawaii Hilo soccer director Lance Thompson resigned last week to run a youth soccer organization in Arizona and coach a club team at Grand Canyon University.
Behind the scenes, the exit had been in the works for a while. Thompson told athletics director Pat Guillen a month or so before he submitted his resignation that he would likely have to leave the post for financial reasons. Guillen tried to get the soccer director — the only team sport at the school in which one coach is hired to coach two sports in the same season — more money, but all he could shake out was pocket change.
Thompson was being paid $42,000 according to a UHH salary structure report in the 2014 season. The salary range of the other coaches went from the $50,000 range up to $70,000, in the team sports where those coaches only have to coach one team.
On the surface, it looks like a disaster, but there’s hope and opportunity in the department after Guillen did the right thing and named Gene Okamura as the interim replacement for Thompson. Okamura played for the first Vulcans soccer team and has been a part of the department for all three years that Thompson was in charge. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone locally who knows more about youth soccer and developing tactical strategy than Okamura. He was the right and really, the only sensible choice.
But it’s also true that Okamura almost certainly would not have been named to the position had Thompson resigned in an angry fit a month or more ago and left the recruiting undone. Had that happened, Guillen would have had to look for someone more experienced in recruiting, but Thompson departed credibly, indicating he really does care about the program and he is fully aware that Okamura probably wouldn’t have this opportunity had the vacancy occurred in April or May.
Now, the school has some time to consider the future and do the right thing for the sport.
It’s insulting to the sport the school sponsors and to the players who sign up to relegate them to having one coach for both genders. If the campus were in heavily populated Northern or Southern California with dozens and dozens of high level youth teams all around, it would be more feasible. If you get enough of the best players, maybe you don’t have to develop each team quite so much.
It’s time to get out of the provincial thinking of the past and realize the realities of the day.
The plan Hawaii Hilo has at the present time for soccer guarantees a constant turnover in coaching for anyone who does a good job. He or she will be noticed and offered a better job for more pay to coach only one team. If the team is at the bottom of the conference every year, the coach can stay as long as he or she wants.
There are many fewer schools now than there used to be with just one coach for two soccer teams — it’s trending away from the UHH model — and ask yourself, if your son or daughter had comparable offers from two schools, one that had its own coach and one that shared the coach with another team, which school would you feel could take a greater personal interest in developing your kid?
They have three options at Hawaii Hilo and a year or so to make a decision:
1. Do nothing. Let Okamura coach both teams and stick with the plan because it fits the budget.
2. Increase the coach’s salary but put one team on hiatus and launch a fund raising drive to generate enough money to re-start one of the two programs.
3. Bite the bullet and hire two coaches. If they are the lowest paid of the full-time coaches, well, somebody is going to be paid less, at least they will have two coaches fully attentive during the season.
Time is on the side of the school. It has a young, smart coach with deep local roots and impressive tactical knowledge of the game. It has many ways it can go to find additional resources, including a stadium drive for a 2,000 seat facility that would serve soccer and high school football in Hilo for decades to come.
The school is connected with the Thirty Meter Telescope project and those folks have lots of money. Hawaiian Airlines has been asked by UH and UHH to dip into some funding to help the two schools make an effort to fully fund scholarships and help strengthen the programs. But the Airlines recently said their mission was to support events like basketball tournaments and the Pro Bowl that would likely bring in more tourists. Helping UHH hire more coaches probably won’t bring more tourists, but a modest facility that could host college soccer and high school football and stage state and county-wide tournaments? That fits the model the airlines people mentioned.
The message for UH Hilo? Take some pride in the mission and go do it. Just because it’s a challenge is no reason to give up and the current situation with soccer is a challenge that needs to be met.
(Connect with Bart at barttribuneherald.com)
