We have more than enough bad news, fake news, alt-news to get us through the day. Sometimes, it seems like all we have.
People are marching in the streets, at our airports, gun violence is everywhere, a private university in Texas had an other lawsuit filed against it last week, this one by a graduate alleging that 31 members of the football team committed 52 sexual assaults in the previous four years.
Had enough?
The whole world is not turning against civility and community building, it only feels like that when we hear about it in a continuous flow, but we don’t have to go far to find people doing the right things for the right reasons.
If you have keiki playing soccer, you have no doubt encountered the Bayfront Jam, which occurs on an almost daily basis when youth soccer groups exit the inadequate parking area while the next collection of youth soccer players attempt to get into the same lot.
Simply put, there are not enough soccer specific fields to accommodate the rising swell of participation in the popular sport, but it could be a lot worse, without the kindness of strangers like Edward Olson and Troy Keolanui.
They call it, simply, Amauulu, the two-acre stretch of a well-manicured soccer field on the road after which it is named. It probably should be called Ed Olson Community Field, with an appropriate sign and a brief statement underneath describing its presence in an otherwise agricultural area on the Hamakua side of Hilo.
It’s not enough to solve the problem of over crowded fields, but it’s hard to imagine what a mess the soccer community would have on its hands without sacrifices by people who care and did the work to construct an alternate site.
“I don’t even want think about it,” said Gene Okamura, the interim soccer director at UHH, charged with coaching and training both men’s and women’s teams in the same fall season. “It would be complete chaos; right now it’s only partial chaos.”
Soccer is able to stay alive and grow incrementally thanks to the generosity of local businessman Olson and his partner Keolanui, who did the work to donate Olson’s land that has become more than just another practice place.
It might be the best natural grass playing surface on the island, even without the amenities.
There is no fixed scoreboard, no lights, grandstand or concessions, but there is a well-cared for, regulation-sized field open to the public, for free. It is the best gift given to the Big Island soccer community to date and it was accomplished through no help of state, county or city government.
Olson owns thousands of acres of land here and on Oahu, purchased after a working career in Southern California where, back in the mid 1950s, he got the idea to start building swimming pools for the new housing developments he saw popping up all over.
“I had $300, but I borrowed $1,900 from an uncle,” Olson said. “The war was over, people had decent jobs, it wasn’t anything like it is now, and they started building all these tract homes. I noticed a lot of them would have a swimming pool here and there.”
Olson originally planned to build swimming pools for the developments, then he realized people wanted them in their back yards. By the time he called it quits, Olson had built 34,000 concrete shell swimming pools, had long since earned his millions, and for a time worked with municipalities building reservoirs, canals and such.
He sold it all, moved to Hawaii and happened to run into some big chunks of land owned by people moving back the other way.
“The timing was fortunate,” he said, just as it had been when he started in the swimming pool business. “I happened to have a bunch of cash, which is what they wanted and we made some good deals.”
Olson formed OK Farms with Keolanui, leasing land to farmers, generally for fruit orchards around the Big Island. In the 1990s, Keolanui was coaching, a trait he learned from his father who died on the sidelines while coaching in 1995.
You could say the lure of coaching and working with keiki ran in his family.
“One day we were here, doing something, I forget what, and I said, ‘You know, we could put a heck of a soccer field here,’” Keolanui recalled. “Ed said, ‘Oh yeah? Sure, go ahead.’”
In 2000, they worked with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Hilo, the agency that deals with water quality issues, among other things. The NRCS provided the information, what was needed to assure proper drainage and the rest was up to Olson and Keolanui, who had the benefit of their own equipment and the willingness to donate their time. They spent about $40,000 and before long, Hilo youth soccer had a new field.
“It took a couple weeks, less than a month,” Olson said. “Once you get the process understood, it’s not too difficult, not at all.”
When the grass grew in, Keolanui set up a fertilizing and mowing program that remains in place to this day. Volunteers pitch in here and there and everyone involved understands the magnitude of the gift for the future of soccer.
Nobody gets charged, nobody gets paid, not the coaches, not the officials, not volunteers like Terry Yamane, a youth soccer coach who serves as an assistant for the Hawaii Hilo program. Yamane guessed last week he has mowed that Amauulu field, “at least 100 times,” over the years. These are the people who make playing soccer here possible.
Keolanui has a soft spot in his heart for AYSO soccer as opposed to club team soccer, but he plays no favorites. They both play at Amauulu, as does Hilo High’s boys and girls, adult teams get their own time and both teams at UHH are familiar with the field for training, and occasionally games.
The UHH soccer field was “constructed” in 2006, but it was mismanaged from the start, completely lacking in drainage of any kind. These days, a decade after it was supposed to serve the soccer needs of the university, it’s still unplayable. During last week’s rains, Okamura dug a couple trenches at the east end of the field with a shovel he had in his truck and a river of water runoff came pouring out.
The Vulcans played an entire season at Amauulu while the school was trying to make the outfield portion of its baseball stadium playable for soccer, a decidedly poor option. In the decade since that field has been shown to be inadequate even for training on most days, the university has been unable to solve the issue, so its teams have often trained or played games on a donated field the school had no part in developing.
Another usable soccer field, like the one that could be engineered on the UHH campus, would be a huge boost to the soccer community.
In the meantime, the soccer community has Ed Olson’s field, the kindness of strangers and some hope for the future.
