The University of Hawaii at Hilo is in the market for a women’s volleyball coach after an end-of-season meeting with athletic director Pat Guillen concluded with the departure of Tino Reyes, a seven-year member of the department.
The University of Hawaii at Hilo is in the market for a women’s volleyball coach after an end-of-season meeting with athletic director Pat Guillen concluded with the departure of Tino Reyes, a seven-year member of the department.
The school announced Reyes had resigned after achieving a record of 78-84 and 59-68 in the Pacific West Conference.
“We had a meeting like we always have at the end of the season, discussing the things that had happened and at the end of the day, Tino chose to resign, it was his decision,” Guillen said. “He has a lot of coaching left in him, we wish him only the best.”
Guillen said they discussed the win-loss record, recruiting and community involvement, among other things, but Reyes suggested the meeting wasn’t so expansive.
“It was about five minutes,” Reyes said in a telephone interview from Ka’u where he was involved in a volleyball clinic. “It wasn’t a good situation. I guess my options were to resign or be fired.
“(Guillen) told me ‘I want to look out for your best interests,’ by encouraging me to resign, I guess, but I didn’t know what was going to happen; I’m to get 90 days pay, does that happen if I resign or I’m fired? I wanted to have a couple day to talk to HR and see what was best, but he wanted to do it right away.”
A Molokai native and former UH-Hilo student, Reyes had been a top assistant at Hawaii-Manoa with the men’s team before coming to the Big Island in 2010.
His teams were 33-12 record and 24-8 in his first two seasons in the Pacific West Conference.
In 2011, the Vulcans advanced to the NCAA Division II West Region tournament, but the program has endured five consecutive losing seasons.
“The search is on,” Guillen said. “This is a sport with a real tradition throughout our state, and certainly here. We want to get back to the kind of success we have known here previously.”
The Vulcans were 10-15 and 8-12 in the PacWest in the recently concluded season that opened with two prospective starters out, one with an injury, the other left school. Senior Marley Strand-Nicolaisen was virtually a one-person team, named all-conference with a host of school records, but she had little help.
“It was one of those years,” Reyes said. “We were really counting on the two we lost before the season and we went down to the last minute with two girls from Bulgaria that would have helped us to a winning season, but those things didn’t happen.”
Reyes said his relationship was, “not great from the start,” with Guillen.
“At our last staff meeting — he always goes around gets updates from everyone — but he skipped me,” Reyes said, “and that sort of made me wonder if something was up.”
Reyes is the third of UHH’s seven team coaches to leave the department since Guillen was hired in September of 2015. Softball coach Peejay Brun, who led the school’s most successful program the last two seasons, resigned to take a top assistant job at Division I Texas State and soccer director Lance Thompson resigned last spring to take coaching jobs in Arizona.