Wright on: Culture comes first for Waiakea football

It’s that time of the year again when our national obsession returns in full glory and we begin to get back in the rhythm of planning our weekends and some weeknights around football.

Fair enough, baseball is the National Pastime, if only because we have heard it referenced by that appellation for 50 years or more, but football, for better or worse, runs our lives in ways that baseball — for the vast majority of us — does not.

Our thought experiment for the day is to consider the meaning of that phrase we always hear in football, “changing the culture.”

It has become a sports cliche, but it is one with actual meaning that fans can evaluate as seasons advance. The term can be used indiscriminately by coaches who want to make their tasks sound more difficult than they are, but it can also be a kind of petri dish that invites the world in for a view.

For instance, Hue Jackson, the new head coach of the Cleveland browns, needs to change the culture there, every bit as much as Nick Rolovich needs to effect the change at the University of Hawaii, but the tasks are not one and the same.

As odd as it may sound for such a hapless franchise, Jackson has a good chance to develop a new culture in Cleveland because of the force of his personality that speaks directly to the NFL experience, but at least as important is the fact that NFL players, more than college, more than high school, understand what it takes. Personalities, bad personnel decisions and other factors get in the way, but NFL players, for the most part, know what makes good teams win; if they haven’t been there and done that, they know someone who has.

At Manoa, Rolovich has absolutely referenced culture change as the biggest need in his first year as a head coach. He has a head start over many others because of his open personality, his dead-solid perfect ability to understand players’ needs and motivations and the reality that it hasn’t been that long that the ‘Bows were penned in to a system that didn’t work — they are desperate for a new direction.

Compare that to the jobs faced by Willie Fritz, the new coach at Tulane, or Dino Babers, the new Syracuse coach, and it’s clear changing the culture isn’t the same everywhere. Tulane and Syracuse players don’t know what the winning culture looks and feels like, they’ve never been there.

The most challenging turnarounds are in high school where losing becomes accepted year after year and the coach burdened with the chore is placed in the position similar to teaching a new language to teenagers who might not want to or aren’t capable of seeing the advantage of learning a new language.

In three years at Waiakea High School, Moku Pita’s football teams have won six games, two each season. It continues to be an absorbing proceeding to watch because of a couple factors, starting with Waiakea being one of the more respected academic and athletic schools on the Big Island. The school does well in most all sports, yet it has been a flop in football, for a long while.

Pita comes out of the big time high school football atmosphere at Kahuku, he played himself and even spent time with the game at the University of Arizona before returning to the islands. At this level, you cannot simply put in a different set of plays and blocking assignments and expect change to happen.

These are young kids who don’t yet understand their roles in making success happen at Waiakea. He has around 80 players turning out for the 2016 team, essentially double the number that showed up his first year.

“Where I’ve been, you just won football games,” Pita said last week, “you did what (teammates) did, you found a way to fit in the group and all together, we won.

“I didn’t come here to lose, but it’s about all we’ve done,” he said, “and I have to be honest, I’ve learned a lot, I’ve seen the other side, you might say.”

Pita came to the Big Island when his wife, Hannah Preston-Pita, was named the CEO of the Big Island Substance Abuse Council. When he was named head football coach, Pita had to work with leftover assistant coaches and it wasn’t a good mix.

“Everyone has to be on the same page,” he said, “and that just didn’t happen. I had a couple guys working against me, not wanting to be a part of it. There was some backstabbing and there was talk behind my back that got back to me, as it always does. It really was a major distraction.”

This year, for the first time, Pita has a coaching staff he knows. Chatting with a few of them the other day, you immediately realized the bonds of friendship, the togetherness, the respect for the head coach.

“It means everything,” Pita said. “I’m me, that’s it, I need help to make this work and I truly believe we are finally on the right path.”

In this case, it means tightening the discipline to make the point of being a part of the team. In years past, things slipped, there wasn’t always a watchful eye on students away from the practice field. That seems to be over with Pita’s zero tolerance rules. Within the last two weeks, two players were removed from the team, one caught smoking, the other seen drinking, on campus.

“On campus, man,” Pita said at the field, pointing back toward the parking lot, “it was right over there. Drinking. When you do that, when that becomes an important thing for you? You can’t play football here.”

These are the kinds of things that have to be done to build the right culture on any team. A couple years back there was a kid who, “was everyone’s bad guy, he didn’t get it, he didn’t want to follow rules,” Pita said. “I was told not to worry about it because he was almost certainly going to be kicked out of school; people said he would be in jail before he graduated.”

The kid did not become the star player and lead them to a championship, he wasn’t even one of the best players, but Pita, a big man with a big man’s glare, told the young man in no uncertain terms what his life would be like if he didn’t join in. The kid didn’t get kicked out of school, he graduated. He didn’t go to college but he got a full-time job and comes by practice to offer his support when he can. He’s doing all right.

Pita has a session each week with the team, talking about life and how we all fit in, no football, just psychological perspectives from his wife.

“This is all about respect at some point,” Pita said. “You hit a girl, you are gone, you attack someone sexually, you are gone, zero tolerance; out of that, out of respecting people who aren’t on our team, we will instill the values of respecting our teammates, our coaches, our opponents.”

They asked him when he applied for the job how long he thought it would take to turn the program around. Pita said, “probably six or seven years,” and he said he saw the jaws drop. He was being honest.

“People develop patterns of behavior,” he said, “and when you’re a teenager, the pattern may have only been a couple years, but to you, that’s a huge part of your life, it feels like it’s all you know. It takes time to break that down.”

They have a new offense this year, a version of the Run and Shoot with two-foot gaps in the line and a few wrinkles to keep opponents off balance. It’s an offense his new coaches know well, one his players took to right away and Pita says it feels good, finally, to be heading into a new season.

That doesn’t mean Waiakea is headed for a championship this year or next year or anytime soon, but it does feel better around the Warriors football program.

That, in itself, is something of a cultural change. Keep an eye on them, they might finally be on the road to football maturity.