Sidelines
IT happens at some point in every baseball movie, most memorably, of course, in "Bull Durham": Trapasso hopes Rainbows
get Hollywood ending"You guys ... you lollygag the ball around the infield. You lollygag your way down to first. You lollygag in and out of the dugout. You know what that makes you? Larry!"
(Assistant coach:) "Lollygaggers!"
(Skipper again, now dripping with contempt:) "Lollygaggers."
The team meeting.
The speech.
Tired of losing game after game after game, the skipper finally decides enough is enough and it is time to sit the boys down and shake them up. Time for some good old-fashioned okole kicking.
This oration makes for great hilarity, and it is always a turning point. The team then rallies, and goes on a winning-streak montage set to feel-good music and laughs in the dugout. Sometimes there are newspaper clippings.
In the movies it always works. In real life, "It usually doesn't," Hawaii skipper Mike Trapasso said.
And there's nothing funny or feel-good about it, either.
Hawaii had its team meeting this week. Wednesday night, to be exact.
Trapasso had seen enough. He lost it. He ranted and raved. He yelled. And gestured. Oh, how he gestured.
First he pounced back and forth, short, sharp, quick super paces to spread his ire around. Then he went right down the line, his arms emphasizing every point like a machine gun, rat-a-tat-tat. He gave them the business. It was fire and brimstone, nobody-dare-say-a-word stuff.
"This was the first one of those I've given this year," he said.
Will it make a difference?
We have the rest of the season to find out.
He wanted his team to be tougher, to not wilt under pressure or give up, or fold. And in that disastrous loss to UC-Riverside, Trapasso saw things that made him blow his top.
On some days, in some ways, this is a first-year program all over again.
It was time for the speech.
TRAPASSO'S COACHING BUDDIES all told him this was coming. All the legends, the big names, the hall of famers, they knew. Everybody knew. Hawaii was not going to win this year. And maybe not immediately next year, either.
Everybody knew, except the people with the highest expectations, the people who can't help but believe: Trapasso, the team, Rainbow fans. Reality is starting to knock on the door. This is going to be a lot of work.
Trapasso has been through this before. In his first season at South Florida, the Bulls finished in last place. By the time he left, in his three seasons as an assistant, USF had compiled a 106-70 record.
He knew this was coming. And he knows, too, what the distant future will bring.
"It doesn't make it any easier," he said.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com