From beginning to end, the 2016 soccer season at the University of Hawaii at Hilo was not what anyone at the school had hoped for.
From beginning to end, the 2016 soccer season at the University of Hawaii at Hilo was not what anyone at the school had hoped for.
You could see it coming last spring when veteran coach Lance Thompson resigned his post as director of the soccer program, director being the term the school uses to describe a coach who coaches two sports at the same time in the same season.
It is a double standard schools have used to expand athletics while spending as little money as possible. That tight pocketbook may be on the way out for UHH soccer, as will be noted here, but first, it helps to know the situation as it currently exists.
When Thompson left after recruiting a new class of athletes, it set in motion a chain reaction that grew into something like a slow motion car wreck. The women’s team was dented here and there, but avoided the most serious hits along the way and they rose up to win their last three games, including their last home game, a 2-1 victory over Point Loma Nazarene, Over the weekend, the UHH women won twice on the road at Fresno Pacific and at Holy Names to earn their final Pacific West Conference record of 3-6-4 (5-7-4 overall), and in the process once again showed a level of competitiveness that was obscured by the record.
The women’s team still has an all-time low of 4-12-4 in 2009, and while this group had fewer wins, they also had fewer losses and more draws. The season was not what they wanted, but they battled consistently and were perhaps closer to the upper half of the standings than one would have guessed, considering the new coach and new players.
It was much bleaker for the men, who finished 1-14-2 and 0-11-2 in the Pacific West Conference, the low point in the 11-year history of the sport at UHH. The Vulcan men seemed to play well in brief spurts — three minutes here, four minutes there — but their lapses were definitively toxic. When Anthony Novella got a goal in the 67th minute Saturday, in his last game for UHH, it carved out a 3-3 draw, avoided another defeat and it played hard until the end.
The previous low point for UHH men was 2-13-2 in 2011.
“We have some things that need to change, obviously,” said interim coach Gene Okamura, Thompson’s former assistant, “and they need to change right away.”
Okamura, as director of the successful Hawaii Rush youth soccer club and former coach of title-contending teams at Kamehameha Schools Hawaii, knows the game as well as anyone and his connections to talented island players is strong. He has developed a mainland recruiting network thanks to his background in leading clinics and seminars and from knowing people Thompson worked with.
“The players know, we need to bring people in, some impact players who have high soccer IQ’s and know how to play in a team framework,” he said. “You know, if Lance was still here, he might have got different results, we have different approaches, but I have to be who I am and coach my style. It’s an adjustment.”
Most of it was predictable from the day Thompson submitted his resignation to athletics director Pat Guillen.
“I think it’s the hardest collegiate coaching position in the country,” said Thompson, now running a club team at Grand Canyon University, a religious school in Phoenix, while overseeing a youth soccer program similar to the Rush organization here. “I know it was the hardest job I ever had and people don’t understand, in most cases, how difficult it is to coach two teams at once.
“Until you sit behind that desk, holding responsibility for all those players — more than 40 — as the head coach, the recruiting director, the tactician, the psychologist and all the rest that goes with it, you have no idea how it can wear on you.”
Thompson said the biggest challenge is travel. The school can’t afford a serious recruiting budget so the coach has to see players on off days on road trips, a snapshot here, another one there.
“You hear about a couple players you want to see on the day between games and you see them,” Thompson said, “but to base a scholarship offer on one look is a very dangerous precedent. I get calls about somebody I saw two months ago and I wasn’t impressed, but I’ll hear ‘This kid is really coming on,’ or something, and I can see the kid two or three times a week because we’re surrounded by teams and soccer camps and tournaments, all the time.”
The UH-Hilo structure for soccer recruiting ensures that offers to prospective students will often be made on hunches and guesses, with fingers crossed. Sometimes, the coach cannot recruit on a trip to California because he or she needs to proctor exams from class assignments taken on the trip.
Guillen says he doesn’t like the situation, either, and he’s in a position to do something about it.
“Two coaches for soccer was on my radar before I was even offered the job,” Guillen said last week. “We are definitely in discussion about moving that way, but that’s about all I can right now; it’s something we need to happen.”
Those comments are significant.
“Adding a second coach would be the best thing that ever happened to soccer at UH-Hilo,” Thompson said, “and I can see Pat moving in that direction, I think that’s something he would want to make happen.
“You have those days where you are on the road, I may get to see a kid early in the day in a tournament, but then you’re in a game, then there’s another game, some kids in the first game go eat and then you round everyone up and get to the hotel, now it’s time for a team meal, then you’re proctoring an exam, staying on top of getting uniforms getting cleaned and it’s the end of the day and to this point, we haven’t talked soccer, we haven’t had time to deal with the issues involving the team.
“Trust me,” Thompson said, “adding a second coach to that would be a dramatic change that would happen almost immediately.”
That change is not about to occur immediately, but before next season? That would be greeted by enthusiasm from the local soccer community.
One thing for sure, whenever a second soccer coach is added, it will be long overdo and it will mark the start of growing the sport at UH-Hilo.