On scholarship: Hilo High’s Pinner gets last laugh

The laughter stopped a long time ago, but even if it hadn’t, Moana Pinner wouldn’t hear it. When the soon-to-be Hilo High graduate steps into the batter’s box, she blocks out everything and everyone.

That includes the words of encouragement from her biggest and most vocal fan, her father, Dean.

Dad’s best advice came back when Moana was at the age when she couldn’t help but listen, when she was a youngster playing baseball with the Waiakea Pirates.

“I would always be te

ased for always being the only girl on the team and not being as good as the boys and always being stuck in right field,” Moana said. “But my dad always told me I could always hit better than them.

“He’d tell me to show the boys what they are laughing at, and I would just rip the ball.”

If anyone is laughing now it would be Pinner, a slugging third baseman who hit .432 as a senior and knocked the ball out of the park in landing a scholarship, half athletic and half academic, at Division II Kentucky State.

“I had a hard time through a lot of sports because I was always the bigger girl on the team,” Pinner said. “Use your power to your advantage, I just want to say.”

Mykala Tokunaga, a 2016 Kamehameha graduate, is playing at Sonoma State, and Warriors senior Kiarra Lincoln is set to play at UH-Hilo, but Division II opportunities have been few and far between for BIIF softball players as of late.

“You have to practice and keep going at it,” Pinner said. “You have to put in the work, you really do. It will pay off.”

A four-year starter with the Vikings, Pinner put up her profile at the National Collegiate Scouting Association website, and she started to get increased interest from coaches after hitting .511 as a junior. She led the Vikings in home runs and RBIs each of her final two seasons.

Pinner showed solid negotiating skills when talking to Kentucky State, leveraging a financial aid package from Valley City State University, an NAIA school in North Dakota, to get the offer she wanted.

“I’m pretty excited to play softball,” she said. “I’ll already have 20 of my closest friends around me at college.”

Pinner also earned a $1,000 scholarship by virtue of winning a science fair, and in late April her travel was paid for as part of a delegation that went to San Diego for the National Junior Science & Humanities Symposium.

The Thorobreds just wrapped up a 16-21 season (8-5 in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) and will have to replace six seniors next season. David Morton, listed as an assistant coach on the school’s website, played a key role in Pinner’s recruitment.

“He really likes my hitting because it’s clean and powerful,” said Pinner, who may switch to first base in college and is considering a nursing major.

The path to Frankfurt, Kentucky, started once Pinner decided she wanted to stick it out with baseball. She began working with hitting coach

Eric Kurosawa, who was happy to treat her as just one of the boys.

“He’s one of my hardest baseball coaches, and he would make me cry, but he has impacted me the most throughout my career,” she said. “He shaped me as a player.”

Though Pinner made a seamless transition to softball starting in the sixth-grade, the final three seasons of Pinner’s BIIF career with the Vikings didn’t go according to plan.

In 2014, she was a freshman designated hitter as Leo Sing Chow guided the Vikings to their third consecutive BIIF Division I title. But Sing Chow left after the season, and Hilo has failed to make states since under two different coaches.

Pinner enjoyed playing for Kelly Galdones, who took over in 2016, but he abruptly resigned shortly before the end of this past season.

It was no laughing matter, but it was experience Pinner can grow from.

“Basically, I learned that I needed to rely on my team,” she said. “That just taught me I had to rely on the girls to push through and push forward.

“We knew it was going to be a struggle, because of what happened and how it all went down.”