This is the first of a two-part series looking at the status of the two basketball programs at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. ADVERTISING This is the first of a two-part series looking at the status of the two
This is the first of a two-part series looking at the status of the two basketball programs at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
The path to success in the Pacific West Conference sometimes defies explanation for its only public school, which also happens to be the only NCAA program in the United States that requires airline travel to play a game against anyone, at anytime, in any sport.
You understand if the school’s basketball coaches sometimes feel as though they are on a circular course that’s all uphill. It defies reality, but there’s some truth to it.
Everyone comprehends the basic truth. The Vulcans are in a financial hole deeper than every other school in the conference given their geographic location, and it’s compounded by the fact that UHH is generally understood to be the lowest-funded program in the conference. That point cannot be proven because all the other private and religious schools can legally withhold their finances from public view.
So when the more well-funded programs go recruiting, they all have an edge over UHH. More money means coaches have more time to recruit, but the California schools have the benefit of not needing the extra money because, whether in the north near the Bay Area, or the south, closer to Los Angeles, all those schools can recruit any day in the season, any day in the offseason at camps and summer AAU-type tournaments when the NCAA allows recruiting. They can theoretically recruit an entire roster on a tank of gas, surrounded as they are by players.
Here’s David Kaneshiro, who might very well pass for the ideal coach at Hawaii-Hilo, with a list of school and community involvement unmatched by anyone else in the department. He’s home grown, a dedicated family man and father figure. He knows the game inside and out, a detailed expert of practice organization and somehow, he has a way of extracting everything there is, and then maybe just a little more, from his squad.
You can’t begin to understand how much he means to the program based on the athletic department’s profile of him, which appears to be five years old and makes no mention of all his school and community involvements, but this is the kind of coach almost sent from central casting to a school like UHH.
He just finished a season in which injuries the lineup, literally, on a weekly basis. He lost point guards Lauren Hong and Vanessa Mancera to injuries, lost his top young post player, Patience Taylor to another injury, went without promising post player Asia Smith to another injury, leading scorer Kim Schmelz missed time, and it went on and on.
This week, he’s off to California to essentially cram a recruiting season into a handful of days away from the Big Island. For him, every contact is crucial, every look at a player must be comprehensive and his review must be accurate.
With the detritus of a season of unusually bad luck with injuries in the recent past, a roster that is missing six graduating seniors from a team that was 8-15, 8-12 in conference play, where does he go from here with such a tight-fisted budget and lack of time on the mainland?
That, in itself is a daunting reality. What do they need? Everything. When do they need it? Yesterday.
“We are losing people at every position,” he said before heading out on the recruiting trail, “it’s to the point where it’s hard to say there’s even a priority. Everything is a priority.
“All our point guards are gone, Alexa (Jacobs, a four-year backcourt player who had injuries of her own for two seasons), Vanessa and Lauren. Obviously, that’s a priority, but we need help inside, we lost Sydney (Mercer, second on the team in scoring, 3-point field goals and free throw percentage), we lost size (Pilialoha Kailiawa), we have to find some players, and not just players, we have to find the kind of people who are right for Hilo.
“That’s a pretty big thing,” Kanishero said. “This is really a special place, we have things here we think are pretty beneficial, but they aren’t well known. It takes some explanation, a little bit of mutual understanding.”
At this late date, there is still an opportunity to locate good players. Sometimes they can almost fall into the lap of a coach who has a good network of high school and community college coaches. Kaneshiro is one of those coaches. He found his leading scorer, sophomore Kim Schmelz, who was never on his list two years ago, through his network of recruiting contacts.
“We were lucky to find Kim,” he said, “it was late in recruiting, I think, later than it is now, and she was not on any list of any kind. People were making their (college choice) decisions, and I got a call from a (high school coaching) friend who tipped me off on her. He said she could play and she might be falling through the cracks in some way.”
Kaneshiro followed up, made the phone calls, talked to Kim and her parents. It’s impossible to speak to Kaneshiro in person and not come away with a level of respect and admiration for this man whose values are grounded in our community, our sense of ohana. It took a little time, but when they paused to listen, they liked what they heard.
It’s the best part of recruiting for Kaneshiro, having the opportunity to explain the sheltered virtues of a college athletic career on the Big Island. It’s also the part of the job, apart from the games themselves, he enjoys the most.
“The opportunity to meet these kids with their educational and athletic goals, to meet their families who want the best for their daughter, it fills me up, makes me feel good to know these people in these communities,” he said. “Getting to know these players, having a chance to help them meet their goals, it makes me feel good, not just about our program, but about the country. So while it’s tough given our resources and where we are, the chance to reach out and bring in some good people is very important to me.”
In that regard, it’s completely unfair to make judgments on Kaneshiro or any of the UHH coaches in there same way one would with their competitive rivals. It is a supreme accomplishment for any Hawaii-Hilo athletic program to win as many as they lose, given the restrictions placed on them by school finances and geography.
A winning season? It’s not impossible, Kaneshiro has had two of them, but such seasons are outliers, times and circumstances when the cosmic tumbler seems to click just right for a school that is, itself, an outlier to the NCAA norm.
Here, the value of Kaneshiro’s approach is more personal than at other schools. Winning and losing takes over at some point because administrators sometimes take losing seasons personally and think they can fix it.
This was, game in and game out, a team that never backed up, never gave in. After you’ve seen enough games, thousands over the years, even reporters can see the quit in the eyes of a team that has given up, it almost jumps out at you.
This team? The one Kaneshiro coached in 2016-17 never had that look in its eyes, they kept getting knocked down and each time they seemed to get up faster than the time before.
That comes from something inside the players, but it comes from more than that. It starts with the coach who knows what the right players look like for this environment, this unique ohana culture.
And when you go through a whole season with serialized injuries against better funded teams, and you never see that quit in their eyes?
That is a remarkable accomplishment no matter what the scoreboard says.
[italics] (Next week, a look at coach GE Coleman and the UHH men’s basketball team) [end italics]
