There never seems to be the right time to thank everyone who allows me to intrude on their lives for a day or two of research that produces a column on the sports page each Monday, so let’s make this that time, just because we can.
The pleasure of meeting and getting to know people beyond their names and faces has been a weekly joy, but once a year it seems appropriate to look back at a few whose stories remind me why Hilo is such a special place. We’re not too small, not too big, not too full of ourselves, but never question our pride.
Truthfully, I’d like to include everyone I met in 2018, but newspapers only have so much room, so in the limited space available, here are a few whose singularity of purpose jumped out as I looked through the last 51 weeks.
A True Survivor will not be knocked off course by dead-end promises that never come true, jobs that aren’t what they seem, pay scales that discriminate, or anything else that might discourage others.
Daphne Honma, today the vice-principal at Honokaa High School, has always maintained focus on her goals. She didn’t allow being named the inaugural women’s basketball coach at the University of Hawaii at Hilo — paid less than one-third of what the male coach of the men’s team was paid — and then being left without adequate funding or other institutional support, stop her.
Honma is a Big Island gift, a dedicated basketball coach who has channeled her talents into improving the skills and young lives of those she has taught. Her approach has always been to use basketball as vehicle to explore life’s opportunities and the message gets through to her students.
One of them, Kahea Schuckert, is the athletic trainer at Honokaa these days, another one she tutored, Keisha Kanekoa, is the Honokaa girls’ basketball coach.
Some people might have headed in a different direction after her UHH experience, but Honma went straight back to her roots at Honokaa, kept teaching, moved up in the administration and is, arguably, more deeply involved in making basketball a vehicle to ride through life in her DNA Basketball program for keiki.
A New Year’s wish for more like her would be welcome, but so far, she is a lonely sentinel, doing the good work that must be done for girls basketball to be all it can be on the Big Island.
Repeat Performers are not uncommon in high school sports, but here? That’s different.
Something out of the ordinary is going on with the Hilo High School football team, having advanced to the state championship in consecutive seasons, with what seems to be a more experienced team coming back for 2019.
“You create your own identity,” coach Kaeo Drummondo told his players last June, and they understood the message. The previous year, Hilo won a state championship for the first time for a Big Island team, behind a group the coaching staff had identified years previous in the maturation process as a group that might be capable of making a run to a title.
The coaches were right. That group of 26 seniors became state champions in 2017. Drummondo was telling the returning players what they needed to know and his point seemed to be received.
They won the BIIF, won the semifinal playoff and advanced to the state championship game for the second consecutive season. They came up short, but what they accomplished shouldn’t be dismissed. They are making the state pay attention to Big Island football, in 2018 with a team that included its top seven offensive linemen who didn’t play in 2017. The defensive line’s top six players all competed on the JV team the year before.
Had they not won in 2017, this year’s team would have been worthy of the Magical Mystery Tour treatment, coming out of the Hilo side and rising to the title game. Coming off the field after the last game this year, Drummond said he was excited about the talent coming back.
The momentum continues.
Bill Trumbo passed away this year but the imprint of leadership in athletics he left on the Big Island will endure over time.
We lunched a few times to discuss many things, from the dispiriting descent of the athletics department at the University of Hawaii at Hilo to the full-of-promise potential of his newly formed Big Island Sports Academy. Designed to help local athletes find financial help at Division II, Division III and NAIA schools, where many of our high school grads fit in and where many others could, the BISA is an important idea that could use some community help.
Bill was larger than life, a true leader who could galvanize a room with his forward-thinking ideas, as he did when he negotiated the tricky maneuver upward from NAIA to Division I in baseball. He was a guy who saw the picture and knew enough about the structure of college athletics to find a way to connect the dots from UHH to major competition on the mainland.
Trumbo brought insight, ingenuity and hope to the UHH athletic department while expanding the meaning of aloha across to the Hilo-side community. He was saddened by the conversion of UHH athletics into what he called a “cycle of indifference,” which he described as a loop of day-to-day existence without the hope and unwavering commitment to make the Vulcans matter, something the school has missed ever since he left.
He turned his view forward and came up with the BISA model that would run camps and seminars, host tournaments and generate videos and other online streaming ways to connect our graduating seniors with schools looking for academically involved athletes.
He’s missed.
Perry Harada is a true warrior for what may well be a lost cause, and he knows it.
Still, he persists.
Harada has been teaching and coaching the lost art of boxing to Big Island keiki for 20 years or more, instilling respect for opponents and devotion to the specialized techniques of the discipline.
He fell in love with the boxing game as a youngster when Muhammad Ali defeated Sonny Liston in their rematch, and while his parents wouldn’t allow him to box, he learned the “Sweet Science” in the army and is one of the few, along with Joe Hawthorne and others, who still teaches the art of self defense here on the Hilo side.
At his boxing club, Harada has some simple guidelines:
“I’m not interested in just anyone, I’m interested in the ones who want to learn and have some belief in themselves,” he said. “I have three rules we live by — be humble, be respectful, train with love. That’s what we do, that’s what this is all about.”
Simple truths last over time.
Know an individual or a group people need to know about? Contact Bart at barttribuneherald@gmail.com