We are surrounded by everyday heroes, by the kind of people we all feel are in short supply, and that might be the case because it could be a lot of those exceptional people are like Justin Masayoshi Perry.
If you don’t know the name, maybe you’ve heard of Buddy Perry, the father, in some sense of a thriving youth soccer community in Puna.
You know the type, selfless, with a big need to make things better around him. Maybe the selfless, caring types are committed to being off stage, out of sight for the most part, eschewing attention of any kind.
Like Buddy Perry.
“If he were here,” said Rico Ferrari, who coached youth soccer with Perry, “he’d be embarrassed and probably not too happy about the field and the plaque.
“He definitely would not want to be mentioned in the newspaper, that’s not who he was.”
It’s too late for that. Buddy Perry succumbed to ALS in December of 2015, leaving a void of sorts in youth soccer coaching in the Keaau, greater Puna area, but what he left behind filled that void.
We sometimes make the mistake of revering national figures, people who did things the right way for all the right reasons and are honored as such while ignoring similar attributes in our own community.
People like Gregg Popovich, coach of the San Antonio Spurs, Tony Dungy, who coached Tampa Bay and Indianapolis in the NFL, and Pat Summitt, the legendary coach of Tennessee women’s basketball, have careers that are, or were centered on giving back, right up there with winning.
Not often enough, it seems, do we mention the coaches in our neighborhoods, the ones just down the street who do the kind of things that make our neighborhoods thrive, by demonstrating to our keiki how to grow and how to give back.
My dog often walks me on the circular path at Shipman Park in Keaau, where, on that walk, you pass a sign proclaiming the fields in Perry’s name, adjoining a plaque that describes a bit about his dedication to youth soccer.
There have been a few spontaneous conversations with other walkers near the sign who said they didn’t know anything about Buddy Perry, except for the plaque.
Of course they don’t, they are hikers and walkers, probably without children who played for one of teams in the 15 years before he passed.
More people should know about Buddy Perry.
“The first word that comes to mind for me,” said Kekoa Harman, a close friend who went to high school with Perry on Maui before they both ended up on the Big Island, “is strict. Buddy was strict coach. He knew what he wanted on the field and he knew how to bring the best out of his players.
“But more than soccer, what he wanted was to develop kids who would go on to give back to the community in some way. Education was huge for him, he talked about it all the time and he had ways to monitor what they were doing in school; if they weren’t putting in the effort, not getting the grades, he would sit them.”
This is a club soccer coach, not a coach within a school system that has its own participation rules. Few club soccer coaches would do that, it is a distinguishing feature about the man.
Another thing he did that goes against what we generally think about in club soccer was the kind of players he wanted — the ones who play a variety of sports all year, not just soccer.
Championships and league titles were never mentioned. He didn’t care about those things.
He wanted to develop intellectually motivated young people who would give back. He wanted to play a role in developing soccer fundamentals to the point that players would be ready to play at the college level.
“That was my dad,” said Kaleihali’a Tolentino-Perry, Buddy’s oldest son. “I always say he didn’t choose coaching soccer, it chose him. It seemed like a perfect fit.”
But he did choose his own club, Na Hoa O Puna Soccer club. It was just Perry’s team when it all started, but last year, when the club held its 5-on-5 tournament, it attracted 11 Na Hoa teams along with 46 others competing in the Na Hoa Cup.
As word of his coaching spread, Perry would get phone calls from parents inquiring about their sons and if he had room for them. He would always be interested in the ones who played other sports and were doing well in school.
“If he got the idea the kid was a good person, interested in going to college, he’d follow up and probably invite them,” said Tolentino-Perry. “He would always say, ‘If you’re not able to balance school work and playing on a team, maybe being a soccer player isn’t the best thing for you.’
“I heard that so many times.”
Over time, Na Hoa O Puna expanded, taking on a girls division while Perry stuck with boys. Ferrari led the girls teams but they all maintained the approach of developing players, not seeking titles and cups and such.
“We really don’t care about championships,” Ferrari said. “If it happens, it happens, but that’s not the aim.
“We have a U-12 team that won the league four times, so we moved them up into U-14 for the challenge. When his teams would win and get medals or something, he would never accept them, he’d give them to someone. That was just him.”
Buddy Perry was about pure soccer coaching, about forcefully telling players they needed to give back to the community, and if they did, it would come back around to them, maybe not immediately, but sometime, it would come back.
Near the end, when ALS was taking over and he was losing weight and strength, Perry didn’t stop coaching.
“I still remember him, in shorts, a T-shirt and in his wheelchair, he’d be out there in the rain,” Tolentino said. “I remember one time I was cold and wet and stepped back some and there he was, rolling out there, coaching, hollering out stuff to them. He didn’t want to go home or stop practice. That was him.
“There were a few things he would say, his cliches, I guess. One of them was, ‘No scared ‘em, Go get ‘em;’ and the other ones was ‘Go hard or go home,’ you would hear that at every practice.”
His rule was that players would run off and on the field at all times, because “it encouraged that energy he always wanted,” said Harmon. “If not? He would say, ‘You know what? You need to sit for a while.’ He wanted everything they had.’”
He said he would beat ALS by working and smiling but that was one thing that didn’t happen.
He passed at one with dozens of parents, players, and former players coming by in those final days. On the last day, they all came back, with friends. They would file in, pay their respects personally, then let the next person in line say goodbye.
At the end, the house couldn’t hold them all, the line went out the front door, spilling into the yard. There were maybe 150 of them by one estimate.
They all said goodbye and then they named the soccer fields after him and put up a plaque so the ones who didn’t know him, the hikers, walkers, tennis folks and softball players who played nearby, might get a sense of who Buddy Perry was.
He was larger than life.
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