When this year’s University of Hawaii freshman volleyball class reported for the second summer school session Monday, a month in advance of its first practice, it already owned one distinction in Rainbow Wahine annals.
It is the last one that Dave Shoji has, cross his heart, pledged to coach.
"I promised that I’d coach them for a year," Shoji said. "But I didn’t promise them anything after that."
Shoji isn’t saying whether his 39th season at UH will also be the last of a remarkable era, but for the first time the Rainbow Wahine head into a year knowing that the departure of their Hall of Fame coach is a very real possibility.
"I guess they understand that," Shoji said.
We’ve all known it is coming one of these days, of course. But like the run of 18 consecutive conference championships and 31 overall NCAA tournament appearances, it has seemed he’d just keep rolling along.
Yet, at age 66 (and 67 if UH goes deep in the postseason), this could be the final go-around for the man who will become the game’s most victorious coach soon after Labor Day when he passes UCLA’s Andy Banachowski with win No. 1,107.
SHOJI (1,103-184-1) does not talk like someone with an eye focused on the finish line, but he is no longer keeping the possibility at arm’s length, either. Though Shoji continues to solicit recruits for 2014, he does so with an important proviso. He said he tells them, "If you come to Hawaii, you come for the program, not because I’m coaching."
It is something that goes to his philosophy of how prospects should choose a school and is a message he has voiced for a while. Only it takes on more poignancy and greater urgency now that a departure looms as more of a possibility.
Separating Shoji and the program he has headed since 1975 is easier suggested than done. Other coaches long ago began to talk less in terms of "the Hawaii program" and more along the lines of "Dave’s program." The four national championship banners that hang in the Stan Sheriff Center rafters, a string of All-Americans and attendance records attest to how intertwined they have become. And why his projected date of departure stirs such interest.
Which is part of why Shoji said he can’t go anywhere these days — church, golf course, store, restaurant, etc. — without somebody asking him how much longer he plans to stay at UH.
"Friends, random people, clerks — everybody asks me," Shoji said. "I get it everyday."
Shoji said, "I tell them the same thing I tell you — I’m year-to-year." Shoji said. "I really can’t say what (the odds) are. I mean, I’m feeling pretty good right now. I’m feeling good about the team that we will have in ’14. I think (a decision) will be clear to me after the season, clear-er, I guess."
In the meantime, Shoji said he has yet to have a discussion of his future with UH administrators, generations of which have told him he has a job as long as he wants one. But then the lack of a recent heart-to-heart sit-down is hardly surprising. The last headache they want to take on right now is the task of replacing the school’s most irreplaceable coach.
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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
