Editor’s note: This month marks the 50th anniversary of Title IX. To commemorate this watershed event, the Star-Advertiser will publish a series of stories celebrating the achievements of female pioneers and leaders with Hawaii ties.
STORIES: June 23—Patsy Mink and Donnis Thompson. June 26—Clarissa Chun.
It might not be reflected in the history books, but Patsy Dung did just about everything to advance women’s athletics starting in the 1960s and ’70s.
She stenciled logos onto t-shirts for the community team she started, the Kalihi Jets. She drove a truck full of recyclables to the center in an effort to raise money for the Jets, a team that provided girls and women at the high school level and above opportunities to play sports in Hawaii during a time when there weren’t many.
“She was ahead of her time,” Jeanne Chang said. “She wanted to do things for the kids.”
Chang, a retired PE teacher who was also an athletic director at St. Andrew’s Priory, was one of the educators Dung got to know over her 30 years teaching at Farrington. Chang and other teachers helped Dung with the Jets, who played against teams outside of Oahu in places such as Tahiti and Pennsylvania.
“Patsy wanted our experience to be larger than the island leagues,” Sandy Vivas, a member of the Jets, said in an email to the Star-Advertiser. “We stayed in homes and got to know the other teams. They reciprocated by coming to Oahu.”
Vivas and a friend, Miki Okumura, attended Punahou School and were looking for extra athletic opportunities. Someone connected her to Dung and the Jets.
“There was a little trepidation on our part,” Vivas noted. “Would this group like to have Punahou kids play with them?”
“Patsy immediately welcomed us to the Kalihi Jets.”
The Jets got their name from the airplanes flying over Kalihi. They started off as a softball team before going into other sports.
“Volleyball came along because she had a gym we could go to and practice,” Sweetie Kaulukukui said. “Then basketball came along.”
Opportunities to play sports were very limited for women prior to Title IX. Basketball was one that was recently offered, and not everyone offered it.
“They would have track and field one year, volleyball the next year,” Kaulukukui said.
Dung’s work with the Jets put her at the top of athletic director Donnis Thompson’s list of coaching candidates for the new women’s basketball team at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She took the job in 1974 and became the first-ever coach of the program.
Back then, the position was part-time and not well paid; Dung was still teaching at Farrington while she was coaching at UH. She would coach the team in the evening at Klum Gym, the only time the facility was available for the team.
“She had a very, very long day every day,” Judge Sabrina McKenna, one of Dung’s players at Hawaii, said in a phone interview. “That was just a sign of her commitment to advancing and giving opportunities to women and athletics.”
McKenna described Dung’s coaching style as “very calm and very fair.” In her five seasons at Hawaii, Dung went 31-20. Most of her coaching staff at UH were teachers from the Jets who volunteered, including Chang and Kaulukukui.
“We took stats for her and we were on the other side of the court playing against them (in practice),” Chang said. “There weren’t other basketball players around, so we pitched in and scrimmaged against them.”
On the official record, UH played teams such as Brigham Young-Hawaii (which was called Church College of Hawaii at the time), Alaska-Anchorage, and Hawaii Hilo. Newspaper clippings in scrapbooks Dung provided showed that the team also played games against some of the community colleges on the island.
After Dung concluded her time coaching at UH, she continued to teach at Farrington until 1993, when she retired to take care of her family.
Dung’s memories of her career at Farrington, UH, and with the Jets are there in pieces. She remembers how coaching at UH was an “after school” activity, how she didn’t play sports growing up, and graduating from Roosevelt High School and later Michigan State University before coming back to teach at Farrington.
Raelene Domingues, one of Dung’s players at Hawaii, is the main caretaker of Dung, who is now 85. She and some of the other Jets ensure that Dung is active and doing something these days — eating mountain apples and watching an ukulele group play at UH’s Manoa Gardens, for example.
Members of the Jets, both players and teachers, still keep in touch with Dung, some calling her once a week to catch up. A number of her players have gone on to have success in their careers, some following in her footsteps in teaching physical education.
“She has been my reason for being a PE teacher,” Kaulukukui said. “Technically, I wanted to be a math teacher.”
Vivas went on to be the executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association for 17 years before running an employment website for job listings in sports.
“Patsy dedicated her life to others, be it to her high school athletes, her Kalihi Jets, or her family,” Vivas said. “She modeled a path for me of what was possible for girls and women, and fortunately, I found a career along that path.”
PATSY DUNG
University of Hawaii women’s basketball coach (1974-1979)
Education: Roosevelt High School, Michigan State University
Highlights: First Wahine basketball coach … coached Farrington to two OIA titles in girls volleyball (1972, 1973) … was a physical education teacher at Farrington High School (started circa 1963, retired circa 1993)
