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Star-Bulletin Sports


Friday, November 2, 2001


[DIVISION II REPORT]



art
COURTESY BOB ZELLAR / BILLINGS (MONT.) GAZETTE
Under coach Paulasi Matavao, a BYUH alum, the
Montana State-Billings volleyball team has already
improved on last year's win total by six.



Giving something back

Paulasi Matavao returns
to Hawaii with hopes of
beating his former school

Division II notebook


By Jerry Campany
jcampany@starbulletin.com

PAULASI Matavao is back, and it is not such a good thing for fans of Hawaii small college volleyball.

Oh, it is good news for the many people who remember him from his All-American performances for the Brigham Young-Hawaii basketball team from 1994 to '99. It is also good news for the group of women he brought with him to experience how volleyball is appreciated in Hawaii -- the way he hopes it will be someday in Montana.

But don't get him wrong, Matavao's main reason for coming back to the Islands is to beat all of the four local teams on their own floors and possibly take a few local recruits back to Billings with him.

"I am excited to be back," Matavao said. "If we win our games, we can finish in a tie for second. I will also be working on a couple of local kids, seeing them play live and trying to get them to come to the cold weather."

Matavao is the coach of Montana State-Billings. Although his team is already out of the running in the Pacific West Conference, the Yellowjackets have an indirect say in who takes the conference title. Montana State-Billings plays Hawaii Pacific and BYUH once each, with the Sea Warriors two games up on the Seasiders with two to play.

art
COURTESY BYUH
Paulasi Matavao played for the BYUH basketball
team from 1994 to '99. His volleyball team takes
on his alma mater on Tuesday.



The Yellowjackets play Hawaii-Hilo tonight and visit HPU tomorrow before hooking up with Chaminade on Monday and trying to knock out BYUH on Tuesday.

Should Matavao's team beat HPU and lose to his alma mater, it would send the race down to its final day.

That the Yellowjackets have any say at all in any kind of volleyball championship after being the conference's doormat for so many years is impressive enough. That they are doing it with a new head coach who has not been actively involved in the game since high school except for playing on the club level is unimaginable.

Matavao had never coached anything anywhere, except for a brief stint as an assistant basketball coach at BYUH under Ken Wagner. But it was on the hardwood of the Cannon Center that Matavao's ability to lead started to come out.

"With his personality we expected him to do well as a coach," Wagner said. "He always understood our defense better than anyone else. The way he played and coached at clinics, you could see that he could be a successful coach."

Although his Yellowjackets are only 5-6 in the conference, count his second year as a successful one.

His team has already won 15 matches -- six more than last season. The Yellowjackets stretched defending champion HPU to five games in Billings after upsetting BYUH earlier this season. The win over the then-No. 15 Seasiders in Billings gave the program its first over a ranked team.

"That was a big win for the program," Matavao said. "My girls really surprised me this year with their hard work over the summer. They got off to a great start and kept playing well."

DON'T EXPECT this year's resurgence to be a one-time thing either.

Despite the cold weather, Matavao says he is in Billings for the long haul and hopes to complement his roster with more and more talented Hawaii players each year. After being forced away from the game for so long, he wants to repay those who gave him his first big break. Were it up to him, he would have been involved in volleyball all along.

"I left Samoa to play volleyball for BYU in Provo," Matavao said. "The scholarship didn't work out, so I fell back on basketball. Volleyball has always been my first love. I went into basketball to get my education. I wasn't the best basketball player but it did get me my education."

Now Matavao gets an education of a different sort.

Where before he learned the basics of coaching from Wagner, now he is learning at the side of such legendary coaches as Hawaii-Hilo's Sharon Peterson, BYUH's Wilfred Navalta, Chaminade's Glennie Adams and HPU's Tita Ahuna without them even knowing it. Every time he trots his team out against one of them, he expects to be taken advantage of -- at least for now.

"They do (intimidate me), they know so much more than I do," Matavao said about Hawaii's collection of legendary head coaches. "When I am looking over my back to try to see something, they will pick it up right away. They have all been so successful, I can only learn from them."



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