Wright On: Brun thinks softball program can go far

The distance from Lihue to Hilo, as the plane flies, is right about 317 miles, not a great distance for one of Kauai’s better athletes to find a coaching home on the Big Island.

It’s all ohana in that sense for Peejay Brun, the second-year head coach of a University of Hawaii Hilo softball team she intends to one day take to the Division II College World Series.

“We can do that here,” she said in her office last week, “we have enough talent in Hawaii and on the West Coast to bring in the kind of people who can do that. I don’t think we should shy away from what we want to do, we want to go all the way, why wouldn’t we?”

That aggressive approach is central to who she is. It’s the opportunity she wants, the chance to make a difference.

Brun was celebrated out of high school and found her way to Manoa where she earned four letters as a catcher and outfielder. After a redshirt season because of an injury, she was a driving force behind the 1994 team that won its first conference championship. But check the itinerary after her playing career.

She coached high school softball for a couple of seasons and then got a job as an assistant coach at Cal-State Dominguez Hills from 1998-2002, for the record, a 2,619-mile flight from Lihue. She became head coach at Siena College in New York, 4,984 miles from home, where she took the Saints to their most wins and highest finish in school history. From there, she accepted a job at Texas State University in San Marcos — 1,873 miles back this way from Siena — where she worked eight years before landing the position with the Vulcans. Located between Austin and San Antonio, San Marcos is 3,516 miles from Hilo and if you add it all up, the native of Kauai traveled more than 12,000 miles to make the journey from Lihue to Hilo and that doesn’t count the back and forth at the end of seasons.

“I guess I took the scenic route,” she said just before the first of 45 days of “fall ball” practice that started Friday that and will conclude in November with three games in Oahu, two against her alma mater and one against Chaminade. “That’s going to give us a look at what we really have and then we can start working on the (2016) season.”

It was a good start in her first season when the Vulcans were 31-16-1 and finished eighth in the region, but the teams that usually move on to the World Series finish with something in the neighborhood of 38-43 wins. Squeezing another six or eight wins out of a competitive schedule isn’t easily accomplished. It’s the kind of thing that requires an intensity of focus that Brun’s players will need to absorb from their coach.

Don’t worry, she has plenty to go around.

“My ultimate goal is still to be a DI coach,” she said, “it has to be, that’s why you get into coaching, in my opinion.”

She was in the UH-Hilo dugout, her players had just trotted out on the field to do some stretching and other warmup drills and as they ran by, you could almost see the energy rise in the coach, from her toes to the top of her head.

“This is good,” she said, “this is what it’s all about. You want to know the truth about me? Let me tell you something. I love beating up on people, I really do, I can’t get enough of it, I love winning and I love watching the other team lose because, in part, of what I contributed to their defeat.

“That sounds bad, doesn’t it?” she asked. “It’s just me, I’ve always been that way, I probably should have been a football player, I’ve always sort of thought about sports that way, but it’s just the competition, the chance to win and keep winning, that’s what it’s always been about for me.”

Killer instincts set teams apart, you can see it every time and it can absolutely be a sustaining momentum.

“It’s been huge,” said senior infielder Brandi Wilson. “It took, maybe a couple days (last year), for the whole team to buy in; practices are quicker, no standing around, there’s a lot of energy.”

But is College World Series too ambitious for UH-Hilo?

“Every one of us believes we can do that,” Wilson said. “We believe in ourselves, she showed us how.”

That’s a good place to start a journey.