Just the other day, it occurred to Bill Trumbo that he was officially out in the weeds, off the path that he so skillfully created over all these years.
It made him smile.
“I did the math,” said the former UH-Hilo athletic director, circa 1990-2000, “and it was kind of amusing, I thought, ‘I’m not going to school for the first time in 72 years,’ that’s since my first day in kindergarten.
“Then I thought, ‘Wait, that’s not right, everybody goes to school,’ so I thought about how long it has been since I got out of college and started in the business of education.”
That happened in 1961, a full 55 years ago, and about this time every year since then, Trumbo has been wrapped up in a new school year. A teacher, a coach, an administrator, he worked in high schools, junior colleges — he was 215-67 at Santa Rosa JC — NAIA schools and NCAA schools. He was a head coach in basketball at Division I Idaho, he took UHH through the NAIA-to-NCAA transition and is in the school’s Hall of Fame for the effort.
This year, there will be no first-day speeches to an athletic department, no welcome to the team talks for the latest recruits. He’s been off the track since his official retirement July 8 at Konawaena High School, where he served as athletics director for the past seven years. Now, he’s on his own and having the time of his life with new concept that has the feel of what happens when a good idea associates itself with an obvious need.
Set aside all he’s done in his career, this new venture for Bill Trumbo has the sense of a legacy production, a natural and necessary capstone to a noteworthy career.
Trumbo is energizing the Big Island Sports Academy, an organization he will run that will stage sports camps, exhibitions, maybe even tournaments, all for the purpose of creating an environment for the exposure of high school athletes worthy of college scholarship help.
His point is that players like Marcus Mariota and others who are objects of competition for major Division I athletic powers, have not and will not need the help of the BISA. But those wildly exceptional athletes are in the vast minority here.
“It’s the population base,” Trumbo said, “we just don’t have the numbers that generate a lot of high D-I players every year, but we have a whole lot of very good athletes who can have great careers in D-II, D-III, and both NAIA levels.
“The emphasis is on education,” he said. “Our feeling is we can maximize the opportunity to get these kids into schools because we have cooperative relationships with schools and we access to fields and we will produce, essentially, recruiting tapes we can send out to schools.”
As much as anyone, Trumbo understands what coaches are looking for, so he intends to generate “combines,” similar to the NFL combine each year, that showcase the specific individual talents that might cause some basketball coach at an NAIA school to sit up and take notice.
They will pound home the concept of academics, which is the door opener, and then use the videos to deliver the athletic component.
“I think we can make a difference,” he said, “because at the levels we’re talking about, the parents really don’t have a clue. If they aren’t bombarded by offers, they don’t know what to do, they don’t even know the names of the schools that might be interested in their sons or daughters.
“The other part of the equation isn’t any better,” Trumbo said. “There’s all these D-III and NAIA coaches out there who just know there are players who can help their programs, but they don’t know where to go to find them. We plan to make it easy to follow our kids here.”
He’s trying to recruit more former players to be officials, loosening up the extremely small pool available on the Big Island, he’d also like to help schools, coaches and parents develop complete plans for education, nutrition, athletic skill development, “ we can do all of it,” he said.
If the message is understood as a chance to get your kid on a video distributed to hundreds of schools that might have an interest, you missed the point, because a lack of attention to grades erases the athleticism.
But if, after 72 years of school, Bill Trumbo can organize a group that will empower students to be the kind of high school athlete that understands grades makes anything possible in collegiate athletics, he will be a happy man.
Actually, he’s pretty happy at this stage of his career, but the Big Island Sports Academy can make that grin just a bit wider.
Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com
