The presence of our islands as a remote outpost in the North Pacific can work a couple different ways when it comes to athletes and the sports that capture their interest.
The import of geography is a constant reference to the people we write about in this section of the newspaper, and after a few years, this is one reporter who has never talked to a graduating high school senior on the Big Island who has not mentioned the tug and strain of the next step.
Should I stay or should I go? Most athletes, by the time they get to their senior year already have a plan, they want to “get off the rock,” and attend almost any school on the mainland, a community college, an NAIA school, whatever is available, just to get in position where recruiters from bigger schools are always looking.
Others have a bond with ohana that urges them to stay close to home, maybe a short hop to Oahu, or remaining on the Big Island at Hawaii-Hilo in hopes that the connection to a conference organized on the mainland might be just as good.
In soccer, the choices are a little different, and that’s a good thing.
Rush Soccer, an organization included among the largest collection of youth athletes in the world, is well established here, with professionally trained coaches and administrators that understand issues and can lean on national representatives for help, if needed.
To be sure, there are uncounted ways directors of soccer organizations receive mind-boggling questions and demands from players and their parents, but in an organization with more than 32,000 participants, there’s a pretty good chance they’ve had to deal with most any issue that has come up over the years.
This is not an unpaid promotion for Rush and its 250 players here on the Big Island, which makes it the largest youth soccer program we have. Hawaii Surf is another strong, nationally affiliated club with youth teams here.
Rush is usually the larger group, but whether it is Rush or Surf or some of the other smaller clubs, there are plenty of opportunities here to find a good place for your kid.
Instead of a valentine for Rush, this is an opening to take a look at the scope of youth soccer here, and perhaps wonder, like I did, why someone would raise their hand and want to be in charge of the whole thing, the point person, the one everyone seeks out to solve their problems.
“I’ve thought about it at different times, then when I focused in on all the stuff that comes to you, I’d stop thinking about it,” said a grinning Marc Miranda, the new Director of Coaching for Big Island Rush Soccer Club. “Off and on, I would think about it, not think about it, then it just came up and I responded.”
Miranda, a former coach at UH-Hilo, and a long time AYSO coach, talked to his friend Gene Okamura, the current women’s soccer coach at UHH and learned, after six years, Okamura was going to step away.
Just like that, Miranda went from a relatively quiet soccer profile here to taking the biggest job involving the most people in Big Island soccer. It all starts at the top, the place Miranda hears all the complaints and receives all the bouquets tossed his way.
There might be 15 or 20 teams he will oversee, each one filled with players attached to parents, siblings and other relatives who are eager to voice their complaints if they see something they don’t like. It’s not the kind of job for people short on patience and understanding.
For Okamura, coming off one of the best seasons that women’s soccer has ever had at UHH — a 10-4-2 record that landed the Vuls tied for second in the conference and had seven players awarded all-conference recognition — the future in college seems brighter, more hopeful. He could have the enough time to recruit and build the program, something he could never do while coaching both UHH teams at the same time. This most recent team and it success no doubt played a role in his decision, with more time to focus on just one squad.
It’s a lot of work before involvement in directing a sprawling youth soccer organization.
“Basically, it never ends,” Okamura said of the requirements one accepts to become a director of a big soccer club. “It’s a lot of work, and in talking with Marc, yeah, we decided the best things to was to re-organize.”
Miranda will get a couple coordinators, continued help from others involved and, with any luck, the distribution of work will filter down to the players, which youth soccer is supposed to be all about.
“It’s about teaching and coaching,” Miranda said, “it’s about teaching proper technique at an early age so as they grow up, they’re solid with the fundamentals.”
Rush is a program that leans heavily on technique and understanding how to play the game, at the most basic level. If you have ever seen young soccer players compete, you are aware of the propensity for both teams to crowd around the ball at any place on the field. As an organization, Rush teaches players to contest opponents one on one, to maintain spacing and stay involved in team cohesion.
When collecting the ball deep in their own end on one side of the field, young players often feel trapped in a corner and try to relieve that pressure by crossing the ball to the opposite side of the field, in front of their goal. Rush denies that pass, teaches players to force the pressure, then convert quickly to offense.
“I love the coaching, I love seeing keiki get the idea of what we try to teach,” Miranda said. “My philosophy has been in line (with Rush) my whole career, but I was doing it in AYSO, teaching those techniques.
“I would not be surprised if my teams have lost more games than they’ve won over the years, especially at the youngest levels, but the goal is not to get the ball to your best player all day and have him or her dominate the game, that doesn’t help the rest of the team grow and learn.”
For the first time he can remember, Miranda won’t be out coaching when the new seasons begin, his 5-year-old will be instructed by another coach so his dad can keep a big organization running smoothly.
“We will teach an attractive style, a successful style,” he said. “If it doesn’t always look that way with the keiki, come back and keep watching, it gets better.”
In his new role, taking over the job from his friend Okamura, Miranda knows the key to soccer success is understanding what makes the game beautiful.
If he can facilitate breaking the young ones out of the narrow box of uninformed energy and into knowledgeable technique, his efforts will illuminate how big the world of soccer is to Big Island youth, and provide a pathway to explore.
Comments and suggestions for other columns? Send ideas to barttribuneherald@gmail.com
