All around the Big Island, baseball coaches are thinking about the approaching high school season. This is what baseball coaches do, tradition demands it happens every year.
It has been recorded that in the 1800s, people in small town America would gather at the general store, warm up around the hot stove in the middle of the room and discuss the possibilities for their teams in the upcoming season.
Granted, the part about wood burning stoves in the general store isn’t standard around here, but the tradition absolutely continues. It is the time of planning ahead over winter, maybe contemplating a starting pitching rotation, consider who might be better suited to relief work, and how might that batting order look?
For a lot of coaches, this might be the most fun time of year. They ruminate on all the possibilities, get encouraged by all the energy that will be there for the first practice, and maybe they will allow themselves, in a very private moment, to think about how they might finish next season.
It must be nice.
Not everyone can even consider the possibilities, particularly when you happen to be the baseball coach at Pahoa.
Scott Salfen will admit to a wee bit of jealousy when it comes to this subject.
“I respect those guys and their programs so much,” Salfen said last week. “Go to places like Waikea, Hilo, Kamehameha, they all have really good coaches, a bunch of good players and they have summer ball and feeder programs that make it all work. They’re getting it done and I respect that.”
Salfen would do the same things, but the student body at Pahoa is so small, resources are so few and the geographic area so spread out that everything becomes a major challenge.
Starting with Salfen thinking thoughts most other coaches of top baseball squads are thinking this time of year.
For instance, he has some kids who have turned out and played for him who he thinks could really grow into the game.
“I have to say, I have some really athletic kids, but we’re a small school, I can’t keep them all to myself,” he said. “That makes it kind of tough sometimes.”
At the moment, while big school coaches are going over details, Salfen has three potential ballplayers competing in soccer, two are wrestling, three are paddlers and he might have as many as four playing for the junior varsity basketball team.
At a school that graduated 90 seniors last year — half or more girls — the dozen or so potential ballplayers he has noticed are being pulled at by coaches in all Pahoa’s sports. He will get them about a week before baseball season.
At the core of struggles in baseball and other sports is the fundamental truth that you only get better over time, and Little League, Pony Leagues, other youth leagues help keiki learn the game have not been available in Puna..
“You can’t learn baseball over night,” Salfen said. “I have watched (Current St. Louis Cardinals player) Kolten Wong since he was in T-ball, I’ve seen him in youth leagues, at his Dad’s camps, in high school of course, and I’d say he has probably taken more than 150,000 swings in that time, maybe closer to 200,000. The more you play, the more you learn and Kolten has proved it — he’s at the highest level you can be.”
Probably safe to say there has never been a Pahoa player who has taken a tenth of those swings in his life. There are just too many obstacles in a small public school isolated from industry and jobs.
Still, there is reason for the Daggers to look toward the future and see a brighter future.
For all his well-publicized issues as Hawaii mayor, Billy Kenoi was working for Pahoa with the recently opened Billy Kenoi Regional Park, a place where Pahoa youth will have a chance to play T-ball, coach’s pitch games and other early learning baseball opportunities.
“This gives us a chance, a starting place for youth baseball,” Salfen said. “We are just starting on the path everyone else has taken, but that’s okay. Say what you want, Billy Kenoi has helped us in a big way.”
It all figures in, eventually. When keiki grow up with mom or dad in coach’s pitch, or T-ball, they get a feel for the game and then their ambition can take over.
Salfen is not one to whine about his situation. He will take what he has and try to make the best of it, but when a young man shows up for the first time, says he has played and after 10 minutes Salfen can see otherwise, he shakes his head.
“It has happened,” he said. “I asked where they played before and I hear ‘Nintendo,’ or something like that. They think playing a computer game means something.”
All of that might change thanks to help from Kenoi’s efforts and the Department of Energy that has invested in the school with plans to expand the gym, add a weight and wrestling room. Back in 1991, Salfen tried to get some work done on a wet baseball field and drainage was partially installed.
There had been several athletics directors, things got lost in the shuffle and a few years ago the field kept getting worse. Salfen asked a class at school to take on a project for proper drainage of the field. They did the work, submitted an accepted proposal and the county and state finished the job.
“It drains beautifully now,” Salfen said. “Sometimes you just have to ask and stay on the case.”
Goals change at a place like Pahoa. Salfen doesn’t think about wins or playoffs, but he would like to see a .500 season with players coming back for the next year, and there’s another thing, too.
“We try to do all these things to encourage proper play,” he said, “and it starts with not making errors, not throwing the ball around, not giving the other team four, five or six outs. So I told them if they play a game without an error on our team, I buy pizza for everyone.”
He was an assistant at Pahoa in the early 80s, coached at St. Joseph’s from 1993-98 and has been at Pahoa as head coach since 2004 after spending a couple more seasons as an assistant.
That error-free pizza game is out there, somewhere, waiting, it just hasn’t happened yet.
But the times? Thanks to facilities, help from the state and county and Salfen’s own dogged determination to get it done, the times, they are a changin’, in a good way.
Tips? Questions? Email Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com.
