Sidelines
Estrella makes winners
out of losersYOU look at Joey Estrella and he smiles. Somehow he smiles, though many of us would have been soured by now, with what he has gone through these last few years.
He talks of the great opportunity his team has of making lifetime friendships. Now, what Division I coach, when talking about the benefits of playing sports, brings up making friends? But this is what Estrella has to sell, straight from the Little League handbook. His players go to school. They play baseball. They compete against the best. They make friends they'll never forget.
They don't win much.
No, the overmatched Vulcans don't win much, and so Estrella reaches for realization in other aspects of the game.
The journey. The competition.
Friendships.
Don't get him wrong. He's as much a competitor as he's ever been. Perhaps more so, these days. Perhaps he would have to be, these days.
Joey Estrella had always won. His old number still stands on the wall at the stadium named for his mentor. And Estrella followed in Les Murakami's footsteps, starting a team from scratch, and winning.
Estrella coached UH-Hilo to three NAIA World Series. He had 11 straight winning seasons, 12 consecutive postseasons.
Now, he says, he has 100 more losses than wins.
And on Monday, Wichita State beat his UH-Hilo team 21-0.
Joey Estrella probably wasn't smiling then.
But he was again, soon. The next day of practice is most important, he said. It's about how you bounce back. It's about how you compete. It's about how you believe.
"I like this team," he said. "They work very hard. We're short a lot of things, especially finances. I'm not going to be one to tell you what our budget was this year, but to compete at the Division I level we need to up that."
They haven't, and they aren't.
It was a decade ago that UH-Hilo went Division I. It was as much necessity as ambition. Division II teams couldn't play a Division I team and Division II teams couldn't travel this far, and soon UH-Hilo wouldn't have been able to fill out a schedule.
In Division I, opponents are plentiful. Opponents with money, means, resources. The kind of opponents that can afford to take on a trip to Hawaii as a "chemistry-building" exercise.
"A lot of these teams are only going to come over and play us," and skip the Rainbows, Estrella said. "And I guess if they're going to spend $40,000, they want to make sure they're going to get six wins and leave Hawaii happy. So that's OK. That's OK.
"We're going surprise 'em."
No. 8 Arizona State wasn't surprised, in the season opener, and the score was 85-15 over six games. Traditional power Wichita State wasn't, and outscored the Vulcans 90-17 over seven. Every year, since joining the big boys, UH-Hilo has had one of the nation's toughest schedules.
Every year, Estrella has tackled it with one of the nation's smallest budgets.
He has no recruiting money. None. He often meets his mainland players for the first time when they show up. "They recruited me," he said of the current bunch.
The team has no true home field. Hilo's nice on-campus facility hasn't been properly repaired since the big storm more than two years ago.
"So right now this group of young men have three fields," he said. "We practice at our field, because we fixed and grassed the field to get it practice-playable. We play down in Wong Stadium, where there used to be the winter league before, playing there. And we also play half of our games in Kona." Players help care for the fields. "So after this year they will have a half credit in agronomy," Estrella joked.
But the scores aren't funny, not when these College World Series hopefuls spank his underdog assistant greenskeepers. It isn't easy. To lose. To keep heads up. To let go of what you can't control.
"He does as good a job with what he gets," said Rainbow basketball coach Riley Wallace, "as any coach in the nation."
And so Estrella works the fields, and raises funds all spring and fall. He came up with almost three times what the school gave him to spend, he said. This year, they got lucky. A player's father won the Seattle Lottery.
(This ain't the Yankees.)
And a proud man keeps losing.
But somehow he smiles, finding the positive. He loves this team. These kids. It's baseball, and they're in this together, and every day is a new chance to win. He has the best center fielder he's ever coached. "His heart is as big as the Empire State Building," Estrella said.
Sounds familiar. Like the coach who can't compete, but still does, every day.
Perhaps Estrella is right after all. These kids must be developing deeper friendships, learning bigger lessons than they ever dreamed, going through this losing. With their winner of a coach.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com