Only a guy like Gene Krieger can come to Hawaii and think of it as a “cold market,” which, when you learn his past, makes sense. ADVERTISING Only a guy like Gene Krieger can come to Hawaii and think of
Only a guy like Gene Krieger can come to Hawaii and think of it as a “cold market,” which, when you learn his past, makes sense.
His career having been divided between coaching volleyball and selling insurance and real estate and, Krieger, the incoming UHH women’s volleyball coach — succeeding Tino Reyes, dismissed after seven years — is a salesman at heart, owing to the jobs he had to afford college educations for his daughters.
“At some point it’s about selling yourself, selling the program,” Krieger, said Thursday. “I had to get out of coaching to make six figures for a while to afford college for my daughters, and I always thought I could use what I learned in sales to further my career.”
After 14 years coaching in a southern California high school, Krieger had a treasure chest of high school contacts, community college and other NCAA coaches, but he’s trying to stay away.
“In sales, you have your warm market and your cold market,” he said, “you always want to go to the warm market to do a deal of some kind, but in this situation, I need to put Hawaii first. I could fill out a roster with all Southern California girls in a short time, but this is Hawaii. Hawaii comes first.”
His forays into the “cold market” here are bolstered by a long list of names, faces, stats and contacts for Hawaii players, a list he showed to a reporter Wednesday.
“Look at all these,” he said, “these are good players we need to be talking to and that’s exactly what I plan to do.”
Krieger had a successful two-year run at Division II Cal Poly (56-22), and another good record at Cal Baptist (141-61), an NAIA program at the time, but after the 1995-96 season he left CBU for financial reasons.
“The world has changed since Cal Poly and Cal Baptist,” he said. “At Cal Poly, I could recruit anyone I needed within about a 30-mile radius, same with (CBU.
“These days, the assistants at Cal Baptist are making $30,000 or so a year,” he said. “That’s more than I made as the head coach.”
His sales career satisfied the financial needs and after four years of no coaching, Krieger took the high school coaching job in Southern California, was a part time teacher and also kept working selling insurance and real estate.
Four years ago he got his second Division II job at Northwestern Oklahoma State, which proved to be a struggle that generated a 24-37 record. Two years after that, a friend of 25 years offered him an open coaching position at Anderson University in South Carolina. Two months later his friend, former athletic director Nancy Simpson, left the school.
“I’d still be there if she was there,” Krieger said of his last job where his teams were 30-30. “But this seemed such a great opportunity I had to give it a chance.”
Krieger didn’t have a close relationship with the athletic director he worked for at Anderson, Bill D’Andrea, and he found himself in violation of an NCAA rule when he took a recruited player to dinner and paid for it himself.
“Just a mental lapse is all I can say, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Krieger said. “I knew the rule, I just, I don’t know, it didn’t occur to me at the time.”
Krieger accepted the job last Saturday in Hilo and phoned D’Andrea to tell him he was leaving. D’Andrea was not aware that Krieger, paid $45,000 at Anderson, was looking for a job. A UHH spokesman said Krieger will be paid $61,000 as head coach of the women’s team and that Reyes’ salary had been $59,000.
Krieger said he had no other NCAA violations in his past and the impermissible act under NCAA rules was of no concern to UHH athletic director Pat Guillen, who conducted what he termed a “nationwide search” for the new coach.
“There were no major NCAA violations to report only minor secondary violations that were self-reported,” Guillen said in an email exchange routed through the school’s sports information department. “This is very normal and expected in a healthy program.”
There was one surprise for Krieger on Wednesday, when he realized UHH is the only public school in the Pacific West Conference and is believed to be the lowest funded of all the schools.
“Is that right?,” he said, counting the other schools on his fingers. “I’ll be darned, it’s just us, but that’s OK. It just means I have to go sell this place even more, but it’s what I’ve been planning to do all along. This is going to be a Hawaii team, filled by Hawaiian players.”
He may take an early step in that direction with the possible addition of four-year star Marley Strand-Nicolaisen, who Krieger said has expressed interest in becoming a coach.
“I hope we can work something out,” he said.
