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Sidelines Kalani Simpson |
Hiring of Bolla not the
splash UH could’ve hadThe apparent pick of Jim Bolla as the new Rainbow Wahine basketball coach doesn't do much for me.
Either way.
I'm neither bowled over by excitement, nor riled with outrage.
Nor anything, really.
OK, I see that he apparently has a "barbecue business," which means that he is my kind of guy.
But the choice itself?
We didn't even get to see Herman Frazier in action with his first coaching hire. No, this will have been a committee thing.
(I thought about running Frazier's own explanation for that here, but it was such a long and winding road it would have taken up the whole column in itself.)
So, no, I'm not penciling in the Wahine as the 2006 Western Athletic Conference champions. Yet. But I'm also not overly bothered by the fact that Bolla hasn't coached in (one, two, three ...) EIGHT years, either, or that, if you want to get all da kine about it, he was, um, "non-reappointed" twice. (First as coach and then as a fund-raiser in the Nevada-Las Vegas athletic department.)
In this business, everybody gets fired. Which, to me, makes Riley Wallace's string of going on 18 seasons at one school almost as impressive as Joe DiMaggio's 56-game streak.
In many instances, past circumstances aren't the deciding factor if you feel you've got the right guy. At UH alone there is a football coach whose biggest blip on the national consciousness was being on the receiving end of a Jeff George meltdown. And an AD who was under so much heat at his last job that there was talk of dropping sports altogether.
And they seem to have rebounded nicely.
If he's the right guy -- IF -- the rest of that stuff doesn't matter.
If the right people believe in you, that other stuff won't stick to you.
(You think Evan Dobelle, for example, won't get another job?)
There's no reason to think Bolla couldn't find the magic again. He was a good coach once. He could certainly be one again.
The rest of his backstory doesn't bother me that much in that regard.
But Vince Goo was very good for a very long time.
We've already seen "good," and what good gets you in women's basketball at the University of Hawaii.
This was a chance to make a splash. To really make people sit up and take notice of this program. In this state and out.
Apparently Bolla -- a guy long out of coaching and into cooking -- was the most compelling name out there.
And we've read former UH assistant Da Houl's account, in this paper, of being "a finalist," which tells me Bolla was No. 1 by quite a bit.
I loved Goo. First, because he was good, most, because he was local. But there hadn't been any real widespread excitement in this program -- not counting the annual auwe at NCAA selection time -- in a while. This choice doesn't seem to change that.
In fact my strongest reaction to the news was this:
Mmmm ... barbecue.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com