In prep football in Hawaii during the 1960s and early ’70s, passing was something you did only on third-down-and-long. Maybe.

“I remember listening to high school football on the radio as a little kid,” Scott Chan said. “And all I remember is running the ball.”

It was the same during Chan’s first three years as a quarterback at Kaiser High School.

“We ran the popular I set. And we got our teeth knocked in. I remember dropping back one step and someone already had hold of my jersey and I was going down for a sack,” Chan said. “We were undersized and lacked depth.”

Eventually, Ron Lee, the Cougars’ head coach, had seen enough.

“We were trying to figure out how to be competitive,” Lee said.

Lee was previously the coach at neighboring Kalani, where there also weren’t a lot of big kids. In both cases he had to figure out a way not just for his players to have a chance to win, but to survive.

“(At Kalani) we went to what was unheard of, an offense where we motioned the tailback into the slot, ending up with four receivers,” Lee said. “Especially with the defense being in the 5-2 (five linemen, just two linebackers), they had a real problem covering the four.”

Ron’s brother Tommy was coaching at Central Catholic High School in Portland, Ore.

“I told him I messed around with one back, and it worked some of the time,” Ron Lee said. “He said nobody was running one-back up there except for a guy named Mouse Davis. He was giving everyone fits with something called the run-and-shoot, and he’d just gotten the job at Portland State. Tommy said, ‘Why don’t you come up here and talk to him?’”

So Ron Lee spent a week in 1975 watching Portland State’s first spring practice with Davis as head coach.

“Mouse was a little cautious about it at first, because he was going to play UH and Larry Price that year.” Ron Lee said. “But we got to know each other, and he became real helpful and let me watch film. That’s kind of how we started. We stuck with it, and that’s all we ran since then.”

Davis and Lee became good friends, and in 2008 and 2009 they coached together at UH.

“We’ve been supportive of each other many, many years,” Davis said. “Ronnie really got into how you run it.”

In Kaiser’s first game with the run-and-shoot, Chan threw two touchdown passes and ran for another as the Cougars beat Campbell 20-18. Chan, who is now the manager of Aloha Stadium, and Kaiser won their first four games.

“No one knew how to defend it,” Chan said. “Waianae dropped seven and rushed only four, that was the best thing. Sometimes (the starters) were out by halftime because we were in a comfortable position (on the scoreboard).”

The Cougars went 6-3 in 1975 — the school’s first winning record.

Four years later, Kaiser beat Kamehameha 27-7 in the Prep Bowl. Quarterback Edmund Kakalia got plenty of chances to throw, but Boyd Yap proved what Barry Sanders showed the nation a decade later with the Detroit Lions: You could run the ball out of the four-wide, not just pass.

One of Chan’s favorite passing targets was slotback Jim Gesser. Twenty-one years later, Gesser’s son, Jason, was the starting quarterback at Saint Louis in the middle of the Crusaders’ incredible run of 14 consecutive Prep Bowl and state championships. They used the run-and-shoot throughout that streak, with Ron Lee as offensive coordinator.

No one knew it in 1975, but Lee’s visit with Davis would change Hawaii high school football forever.