KEAAU — A good dress rehearsal will tell a lot to a sharp director about what needs to be worked on before the curtain is raised on opening night.
KEAAU — A good dress rehearsal will tell a lot to a sharp director about what needs to be worked on before the curtain is raised on opening night.
Gene Okamura is a different kind of director, but that’s the title you get at the University of Hawaii at Hilo when you coach men’s and women’s teams in the same season.
He got a break of sorts Saturday when he only had to coach one team and in the process of watching his women’s side drop a 1-0 decision to Hawaii Pacific at Paiea Stadium, Okamura got an eyeful.
“We have plenty to work on, that’s for sure,” Okamura said after the nonconference match that concluded the Vulcans’ preseason schedule. “We had the majority of the ball, pretty much all day, but we didn’t do much with it, did we?”
The Vulcans fell to 3-1 in the early season after a dominance on the ball, an 11-6 advantage on shots and a 5-0 prevalence on corner kicks, all for naught.
The difference came in the first half when the Sharks were swamped in time on the ball, possessing it no more than five minutes on their attacking side of the field, but one of those efforts paid big dividends.
In the 33rd minute, junior transfer Taylor Greenwood (Cal State-Monterrey Bay) found an opening on the left side but her shot past the outstretched hands of goalie Lauren Spencer glanced off the crossbar. Still pressuring two minutes later, junior midfielder Tiera Arakawa had a chance on a sudden shot that found its way to Spencer for one of her six saves.
Right after that the Sharks were again having trouble clearing the ball and getting an attack going, when junior defender Lucy Maino contested HPU’s Ebony Madrid on a loose ball kicked out of a scrum and headed toward the UHH goal.
Goalie Jenna Hufford came out to grab it as Maino and Madrid both closed in. Madrid took a wild swing that Hufford blocked with her legs, but the momentum rolled it into the goal before it could be stopped.
At the time, it looked like a fluke.
At the end, it was the game-winner.
Prior to the match, Hawaii Pacific coach Gina Brewer said though it was nonconference she wasn’t going to hold anything back or play a vanilla style in hopes of a surprise in the conference game next month on Oahu.
“We have nothing to hide,” she said, “we just want to play hard and see what happens.”
Okamura started a group that included junior defender Meghan Langbehn, who had her best effort of the cross-country season earlier in the day on Oahu and got back in time to take care of the other end of her athletic double duty on the soccer field. She played almost the entire first half and was involved in a lot of challenges that frustrated the Sharks but she missed most of the second half.
“They were a more athletic, more physical team than we’ve played so far,” Okamura said of the Sharks who improved to 16-8-2 all-time against UHH after winning a conference match here last year. “But for us, we just played kind of flat, it surprised me, we didn’t have the same energy we had (in the first three matches).
“I don’t know why it happened,” he said, “but I know they got very few chances and they capitalized on them, while we had, really, a lot of chances all day and we couldn’t do much of anything with them.”
Brewer, unsurprisingly, had the other side of the coin to discuss in reference to her team.
“We just came in with a lot of energy and it continued to work for us,” she said. “Everyone wants to talk about possession in soccer, but it’s not all about possession, it’s also about pressure and we created some pressure in some situations and we battled those guys.”
It doesn’t get any easier for the Vulcans, who open the Pacific West Conference schedule Thursday at California Baptist, then play Saturday at Concordia-Irvine before finishing up a week from Tuesday at Azusa Pacific.