By BART WRIGHT
By BART WRIGHT
Hawaii Tribune-Herald
It will be a little like a homecoming for Gene Okamura when the new University of Hawaii at Hilo soccer coach sends his men’s and women’s teams out for their first matches in August.
A little, but only a little.
The familiar part is that the Vulcans will be hosting NCAA Pacific West Conference games on the field of Kamehameha High School, where, for the last two seasons, Okamura coached the girls’ team to second place finishes in league play and reached the championship game this past season.
That’s about where the fun of homecoming will end, because, while everyone at UHH, including the coaches and players, will benefit from competition on a regular-sized artificially-turfed field, in doing so, they will be giving up about the only advantage they enjoyed against better-funded teams in the PacWest.
The field they have been playing on was set up on the outfield of the baseball practice field at the school. There was a slight rise in the middle of the field, its dimension had to be narrowed to fit the space, but even so an ugly half-circle of infield dirt showed up on the playing field. It was a hard place to find for fans, opposing teams complained as soon as they arrived, but as ugly and unfriendly as it was to the sport being played on it, UHH teams knew its deformities, tilts and dips better than their opponents.
“Everybody will like our new field,” Okamura said the other with a laugh, “especially our opponents. This will be the field everyone we play is used to, whereas the only ones used to our old field were us.”
Still, it’s a happy tradeoff for the homegrown soccer product who was on the first UHH men’s soccer team in 2006, and now, after 10 years, he has made the progression to director of soccer, an administrative term that means Okamura coaches both men’s and women’s teams in the same season, and yes, all the other team sport coaches are assigned only one team and they all have larger salaries.
There’s other good news, apart from getting to coach two teams at once. This really is a dream job for Okamura, never mind the longer hours and low pay. He spent his high school years across the street at Waiakea, suggesting there could be no more natural selection than the local guy who directed Hawaii Rush, the youth soccer program that has always done things a little differently.
With the youth teams, winning was on a list of priorities, but it wasn’t at the top.
“With (Rush), our intent has always been in skill development and generating a true understanding of how the game is played,” Okamura said. “We really didn’t care about winning, we wanted these kids to learn how to build an attack from the back, how to move the ball across the field to try to open up some things in the other team’s defense.
“It’s dangerous because those passes can get jumped on and turned into scoring opportunities for the other team, but we want our teams to develop skills and the only way to do that is with a lot of touches in every game.”
Yes, it’s going to be a different approach with the Vulcans, but exactly what approach that might be is impossible to say until players arrive.
“We will have four in the back,” Okamura said, “but the midfield? How we organize up front? I need to get players in here and see their skills with each other and then put all that together.”
Fortunately, he’s off to a good start. Okamura said he personally talked to all returning players and the recruits recently signed by former coach Lance Thompson, and everyone’s on board, nobody backed up or expressed a desire not to play.
“To be completely honest about it, there probably won’t be a lot of changes, or it won’t look that way,” he said. “I’ve been here with Lance all three years, we put together the strategies we’d play by, the tactics in each game and there wasn’t anything we were doing that I thought we shouldn’t have been doing.”
The one significant change he instituted involves practice times. Instead of men’s and women’s teams practicing back-to-back after school, Okamura will have women’s practice from 6 a.m. until 7:30 a.m., with men practicing at their regular time from 2-3:30 in the afternoon.
“There were times when people showed up late beaches of classes or labs or whatever,” he said, “but no class starts before 8 in the morning so, at least for one team, there should be no excuses at all, so that eliminates 50 percent of the problems. If someone on the women’s teams has labs or something involving academics after school, no problem; I’ll just have to deal with the guys.”
Maybe next spring, he’ll add an alumni game. Maybe they will be able to practice a few times at KHS. Maybe they can get more results with a change of scenery and a new coach.
“There’s a lot of maybes,” Okamura said. “I’m just excited to be here, I’m an interim coach, nobody promised me anything. If I’m back after the first year, it will probably be because of what we did on the field, in the classroom, in the community.
“I’m going to give it everything I have, I think it’s fair to say nobody has been invested in this soccer program more than me, this is something I really want.”
It all seems so familiar, from the new coach who was the former player, to the new field the new coach knows so well. That hardest part, like the song said, is the waiting.