COURTESY HAWAII PACIFIC UNIVERSITY
Hoku Ornellas transferred from Regis to Hawaii Pacific only to see her soccer career cut short by HPU making it a club sport.
When its core shows up a half-hour early for practice, the Hawaii Pacific women's soccer team looks like any other in the NCAA. Sea Warriors still
kicking it as a club sportBy Jerry Campany
jcampany@starbulletin.comA few players spend the entire time running up and down the sideline, a pair works on centering passes and the rest do their homework and laugh together on the bench.
But the Sea Warriors' bunch is not in the NCAA, and hasn't been for nearly two years now. It is a club sport with a college name.
"We are still serious about our soccer," Hawaii Pacific coach Mark Kane said. "We are still about improving ourselves in every aspect of the game."
The old news is that before the 2001 season a majority of the Pacific West Conference split off and formed another league, leaving the PacWest with three soccer teams and no interest in making more. Because a conference needs at least six teams to hold a championship, Brigham Young-Hawaii and HPU were forced to drop their programs.
The new news is that the HPU men's and women's teams are still together, and may be even stronger now.
"We wanted to keep soccer active around the university," HPU athletic director Russell Dung said. "It's such a big sport in Hawaii at every level and another opportunity for us to give local people an education. Who knows, maybe later on down the road we can bring it back to the NCAA. Until then, we want to keep the foundation there."
They don't play NCAA competition unless they can lure programs over for tournaments or exhibitions, instead testing their skills against local recreational leagues like the Women's Island Soccer Association and the Men's Island Soccer Organization.
The timing was not the best for the women's program, as Kane had finally built it into a winner and expected it to take the next step and become a champion. But one day, out of nowhere, Kane had to assemble the girls and tell them that the conference split and that there was no more soccer team. No more season.
"All I could tell them was the truth," Kane said. "What more can you do but be honest and tell them that they have done everything right. It's not their fault that the conference leaves, so to speak."
Hoku Ornellas was training for her senior year with the team when the bomb dropped.
"It was kinda out of nowhere, that they told us," Ornellas said. "We were training for next season already and all of a sudden it was like ... gone. It wasn't something that was in discussion for a long time, it just kinda hit us one time."
She is one of the few still with Kane, one of those who studied at the school on a scholarship just for playing club soccer and stuck around to get one of the 50 percent tuition waivers each player receives today.
HPU didn't have to honor its agreement with Ornellas. It certainly doesn't have to pay her to play now. But Kane said then-athletic director Tony Sellitto would not have it any other way.
"Tony has always been a great guy about giving girls opportunities to finish their education," Kane said. "He talked to the powers that be to tell them that we had a responsibility to these girls that we made to them when they were freshmen."
But judging by the enthusiasm at one practice, everything turned out all right.
The Sea Warriors immediately joined WISA and went from five hard practices each week to two fun ones. They no longer represented their school against other programs, but found that the recreational scene in Hawaii is every bit as tough as the old PacWest. The PacWest never featured teams of 26-year-old Division I talent.
"The WISA first division is every bit as tough as the conference that we played in," Kane said. "Top three teams are mostly ex-college players, a lot of them (Division I) players. It is every bit as competitive as you want a conference to be."
As competitive as it is, it is still not the same. After all of the defections -- about half the team left after the announcement -- Ornellas and her mates tried to ignore the politics and play as hard as usual. But then reality caught up with them.
"He (Kane) tried to keep it the same, keep it all familiar," Ornellas said. "But eventually we caught on and asked ourselves 'What are we so intense for?' It is not the same, you want to play other schools."
Kane still recruits, but high school all-stars and foreign players are pretty much out of the question. The Sea Warriors still take on their old PacWest rivals from time to time, luring Western Oregon to the islands around Labor Day. Western Oregon was one of the teams that split away from the conference, saying that the burden of travel to Hawaii every year was too much.
"They still want to come to Hawaii," Kane said. "I can easily put together a full schedule if given the chance. A lot of teams out there want to use the promise of Hawaii in their recruiting."
Kane says he and his girls always talk about what might have been, and keep their ears to the ground for the possibility of rejoining the NCAA even though roughly half of the team would have to be cut and half of the survivors would probably have to be replaced with better talent.
The PacWest needs to add one more women's sport by 2004, and although a women's soccer team is one of the most expensive to get from place to place because of its size, Kane and his girls hold out hope that they will be able to get back to NCAA-sanctioned competition.
Their hopes abandoned them just this fall when the conference decided to add men's and women's golf by 2003. They hoped the fact that they had a ready-made program might work in their favor, but the mainland schools tasked with traveling to Hawaii several times each year weren't so impressed.
"We were kind of hoping, had our fingers crossed and Russell (Dung) was pushing for us," Kane said. "But they decided on one that wouldn't take as much money. That was a little bit of a disappointment, but we knew it was a long shot. I am hoping the next one will be a team sport, not just for us, but because team sports teach so much that is used as a model for CEOs in the real world."
But until the politics swing in their favor, all the Sea Warriors can do is keep playing the game and count their blessings for the ability to do that. Kane says that in just a year and a half, the team has become more of a club sport than the NCAA program it was. Although he misses the recruiting and has to spend a lot more time teaching basic skills than he ever did, he believes that is just fine.
"Everything is more in balance for them," Kane said. "The situation we have now allows girls to go to school, financial aid, continue to play soccer. For some of these girls, it is better this way."
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