By BART WRIGHT
By BART WRIGHT
Hawaii Tribune-Herald
Just as was the case a year ago, the University of Hawaii at Hilo baseball team recently opened the 2017 season in a fashion that gave its players, coaches and fans a celebratory moment of heightened interest.
Some may have hyperventilated last year when fifth-year senior Jordan Kurokawa opened the new season with a complete game shutout of the University of Hawaii at Wong Stadium.
Something roughly similar happened this season when the Vulcans played well in a couple of exhibition games, executing bunts, moving players on the bases, making all the routine plays in the field and then did the same in the first Pacific West Conference game with a 5-2 win for starting pitcher Eric Vega against Hawaii Pacific.
Don’t hold your breath, you’ll be needing it. Last year that exciting beginning was followed by an 11-9 loss to the Rainbows and then came eight more wins in the next 40 games, a long bumpy ride. This season’s energizing start soon collapsed into memory after HPU swept the final three game of the opening weekend by combined score of 37-6.
What happens next will unfold this weekend at Wong Stadium against Academy of Art (6-11, 2-2 in Pacific West Conference), with a doubleheader Saturday starting at 4 p.m. followed by single games Sunday and Monday at 6 p.m.
“It really boggles my mind,” said UHH (1-3, 1-1 PWC), coach Kallen Miyataki, “I can’t understand it, so I ask myself questions. Did I do all I could? Apparently not, I’m the coach, the blame falls on me, it’s a little hard to understand.
“We played really well against Japan, it carried over to the opening game and then what happened?” he said. “It tells me we have the potential, we know we do, we saw it, but we have issues executing.
“We have to find out why we tend to shut down instead of saying, ‘What can we do to beat these people?’ We have to learn to dig down deep and learn those life lessons. When things go bad, do you work harder or do you find a hole to crawl in and cry?”
Academy of Art coach Dan McDermott, in his third season at Art U, knows the issues at Hawaii Hilo well, having played here a few seasons back, and then some, when McDermott attended St. Mary’s College in Moraga, Calif., and played for the Gaels against Joey Estrella’s Vulcans.
“Joey is one of the greats, it was a pleasure to play against his teams and see what he could do with them, they have their challenges here, we have our own, so there’s a mutual understanding, you could say.”
Academy of Art is the only school of its kind in the NCAA, with everyone in athletics an art major. The school has been thriving in San Francisco since the 1920s, but it just added athletics seven years ago, literally starting from nothing.
“It has taken time because everyone thinks you need to be a sculptor or a painter or something,” McDermott said, “but we actually have 32 different majors that include more than most people think from technology and everything else.
“For a while we were fielding teams, but these last two years we are starting to get some depth,” he said. “We have always played hard but we are now getting some athletic depth and it’s been helpful.”
Art U is on a rise in baseball, last year’s team setting school records for wins in a season (15-34), and in conference play (9-15) in 2016. Don’t look now, but those records were above what the Vulcans were able to accomplish in 2016.
Both teams will start their top pitchers in the early season in the first game of the Saturday doubleheader. Vega (1-0, 0.00) gets the ball for UHH and Brett Bovee (1-2, 1.86), a 6-foot-2 senior, will start for the Urban Knights . Bovee has pitched 29 innings so far, with 25 strikeouts against only 8 bases on balls. He’s coming off an 8-inning, 132-pitch start a week ago against Concordia-Irvine in which he allowed five hits and absorbed the loss in a 1-0 decision.
Miyataki has adjusted his rotation, with Vega earning the No. 1 job, Dylan Spain (0-1), the 6-6 freshman from Honolulu is the No. 2 role and Thomas Warren is third in the starting rotation.
“We’re looking forward to this series,” Miyataki said. “There are about half the teams in the league that are in a kind of pack with us. Academy of Art is one of those, let’s see how these kids respond.”