Longtime coach and athletic administrator Bill Trumbo, who founded and developed the University of Hawaii at Hilo Hall of Fame, passed away Sunday under hospice care in Kona for advanced Alzheimer’s. He was 79.
Trumbo had retired from his role as director of athletics at Konawaena High School in 2016, concluding a seven-year stint at the school and his formal relationship inside college and high school athletics.
“What a huge loss,” said pastor Daniel William Paul of The Christian Church in Pacific Grove, Ca., near Monterrey, where Trumbo had been the President of the church board.
“He was a college basketball coach who became a church elder, just like John Wooden (UCLA), did at his church. He was a huge presence, a gregarious guy with a big smile and an interest in helping others, he made a lot of good things happen here because he was such a great event planner.”
Following his retirement from Konawaena, Trumbo started a major project he saw as advancing the cause of intercollegiate athletics for students on the Big Island.
The project is called Big Island Sports Academy and was intended to aid in producing and distributing recruiting videos for Hawaii Island student-athletes to a specialized section of colleges.
Trumbo wanted to focus on Division II, Division III and NAIA school opportunities to pursue educational degrees and play sports at a higher level than is found here on the island. He realized only a small percentage of Big Island athletes were ready for Division I schools, but he stressed the need for higher education by trying to unite athletes with schools that fit their individual profiles while providing a higher level of competition.
In a 2016 interview with the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, Trumbo said, “A lot of our kids are well suited for Division II or NAIA schools that simply do not have the recruiting budget to come out here. To me, that’s what we are missing. We are so removed here. We want to be able to communicate to coaches on the mainland how good the talent is on the island.”
Contacted by West Hawaii Today, Konawaena principal Shawn Suzuki remembered Trumbo as “an ‘old school’ man with just enough ‘new school’ to make him accessible by everyone.”
“The number of lives he had a positive influence on here, directly and indirectly, are countless,” Suzuki said.
“… For the past several years, we’ve talked about how we are experiencing the feeling of a Konawaena renaissance, our school turning several corners academically, emotionally and athletically. Bill was (is) a huge part of it. And even if you just whittled it down to the number of championships the school won during his tenure, his impact is undeniable.”
A Southern Californian by birth, Trumbo attended Chapman College in Orange, Ca., where he played wing in basketball and was a catcher for the baseball team from 1957-61, then he coached locally in high school before taking his first administrative/coaching job at Culver-Stockton, an NAIA school in Missouri where he was head coach in basketball and served as athletic director.
He returned to California in 1972, where he was the athletic director and then became a coach again at Sonoma State to rescue a program that had been 3-24 in ’72. In his two seasons, the Cossacks improved to 16-8 and then 18-10 when the school dropped the sport for financial reasons. Trumbo moved to Santa Rosa Junior College where, in nine seasons, he posted a 212–68 (.757) record with seven conference titles.
He was handed a Division I coaching job at Idaho in 1983, but it was after successful run of Don Monson, who went on to Oregon, and Monson left the cabinet bare.
Bill O’Rear, who was recruited by Trumbo out of high school and later played for the Vulcans before becoming the longtime Tribune-Herald sports editor, wrote a tribute on Facebook to his former coach.
“Coach Trumbo leaves behind a remarkable coaching legacy,” O’Rear said, “one that inspired others to chase their dreams while still trying to have a positive impact on those around them.”
His greatest administrative success was at Hawaii-Hilo where he guided the department from NAIA to NCAA Division II and established fundraising programs and popular tournaments that put the school on the NCAA map during a tenure that lasted from 1990-2000.
Trumbo was named to the UHH Hall of Fame prior to starting up the Big Island Sports Academy, whose future is now in doubt. He didn’t spend a lot of time back at UHH, upset by all the turnover created in an athletic director hire that resulted in long-serving locals being fired and replaced by people from the mainland.
He referred to the new direction of the athletic department as, “a mainland kind of thing.
“That’s never happened here,” Trumbo said in an interview with the Tribune-Herald . “I’ve been associated with that program in one way or another for more than 30 years and we have never had this kind of turnover in this short amount of time. People’s time in the department, their years of service and their longevity was never threatened there, not like this.”
Memorial services will be announced soon.
