Ask someone who knows, there has never been a soccer season at UH-Hilo quite like this one, and that’s saying a lot for an athletic program that doesn’t recognize all of the past. ADVERTISING Ask someone who knows, there has
Ask someone who knows, there has never been a soccer season at UH-Hilo quite like this one, and that’s saying a lot for an athletic program that doesn’t recognize all of the past.
Soccer started at UHH in 2006, interim soccer director Gene Okamura, appointed last spring when Lance Thompson left for a job in Arizona, played on that first Vulcans’ squad.
The only trouble with that is that the school has no record of fielding soccer teams in 2006. The NCAA lists a men’s team, but no women’s team that year, so here it comes, 10 or 11 years after it began, both Vulcans’ teams are closing in on the worst records since the sport began on the Big Island.
“This is rough,” Okamura said. “We have struggled at times, but not like this.”
That casts a bit of a pall over Saturday’s Senior Day at Keaau where the two teams will take on Point Loma Nazarene, a top three conference team for each gender. The Sea Lions’ men are 6-4-1, 19 points, on a two-game win streak, in third place in the Pacific West Conference. The women’s team is 8-2-1 (25 points), locked in a battle for first with Azusa Pacific 8-1-2, 26 points, and is coming off a loss, so they won’t be looking past a match where three points looks so achievable.
The Vulcans’ men will start at 4:30 with an 0-9-1 record (1-12-1 over all), on the verge of completing their least successful season, which was 2-13-2 in 2011. Seniors Anthony Novella, Bennjamin Seimers, Jake Sagami, Evan Bacani and Ed Torrison will all see their final competition for UHH in a home game.
“Guys like Ed, Anthony Novello, you feel for,” Okamura said. “They’ve been here for four years, they’ve given a lot and you would want them to go out on a higher note.”
Similar story with the women’s team (0-6-4, 2-7-4), that will have seven seniors in the last home game, including Abcde Zoller, Jennifer Mendez, Nicole Statham, Annabel Gonzalez, Madison Shaw, Destini Soares and Kailah Buchanan. Zoller has scored three of the Vulcans’ 10 goals this season.
“Abcde invested a lot with us,” Okamura said of a player who was a senior last year and was part of Senior Day, but after the season she decided to take up grad school courses at UHH, so she decided to stay to complete her final year of eligibility. “We’ve had two years without a lot of offense but the little we had, she seemed to be involved a lot.”
The low point for the women since 2007 was the 4-12-4 season in 2009, but UHH would have to win all three remaining matches to avoid a new bottom.
Okamura has no intention of seeing a repetition of another season like this one. He is in the awkward position of having been an assistant for a soccer director who coached both men’s and women’s teams. As such, Okamura did not recruit any of the players new to the program this season.
“Recruiting is going hard and strong right now,” he said Friday, “we are recruiting people with certain attitudes, skills and an overall approach we’re looking for.
“We are looking for impact players who will come in next year and really help us change the culture.”
Players on his two current rosters understand some of the issues. They see other teams fly in from California or Oahu with a head coach for each team and paid assistants and trainers, while Okamura and his assistant, Ken Wood, are in constant motion coaching two teams at once with fewer scholarships than fully funded schools like Point Loma.
“It’s a challenge,” Okamura said, “but we will reposition ourselves for next season, we will be better, it’s going to happen.”
For the present, there’s one last home game, to tip the cap to the Vulcans’ soccer seniors.
