The fishing is always good. It’s the catching that’s the hard part. Or so says Merv Lopes, the 81-year-old retired Chaminade basketball coach.

While it may be true for the avid fisherman when tossing his throw net into the shallow waters off the Kohala Coast, the same cannot be said when it comes to the whale of a tournament that Lopes helped spawn following his Silverswords’ stunning win over No. 1 Virginia in 1982.

The fishing for a top-notch field in the EA Sport Maui Invitational is always good, with the catching just as easy for what is considered the premier eight-team tournament in the premier destination: Hawaii.

The 30th edition, which tips off today at the Lahaina Civic Center, is no exception. Three ranked teams — Syracuse (9), Gonzaga (13) and Baylor (20) — are joined by Arkansas, Cal, Dayton and Minnesota, as well as the host with the still-magical name in Chaminade.

And, for the first time in its storied history, all eight teams come in undefeated, with a combined record of 30-0.

"Isn’t that something?" said Dave Odom, in his fifth year as tournament chairman. "The landscape of college basketball has changed so much the past seven, eight years, but the one that is still constant is the Maui Invitational.

"We’ve still got the best location. We’re still the only tournament with wire-to-wire national TV. We think we have the best field year in and year out. The fans demand it and expect it. ESPN expects it. And the teams expect it."

Odom doesn’t need much of a sales pitch.

"When coaches ask who else is going to be there, I tell them don’t worry about that," said Odom, a former coach at Wake Forest and South Carolina. "When they come to Maui, they are going to have three difficult games over the three days. There are no easy ones and we make no apologies for that. We stand on that reputation.

"I know that from when I was coaching. You were in the best tournament. You got to gauge early on how good you were, find out your strengths, find your weaknesses and go home and work on it.

"I stayed up (on the East Coast) to watch. It was worth every minute of giving up sleep."

Several things have changed over the years. The Maui Invitational is no longer the first preseason tournament.

Also, the growing interest created a preliminary round with the seven mainland teams hosting games on campus prior to traveling to Maui. The four teams that participated in the preliminary round but don’t move on to Maui then have a two-day regional; this year, it was Saturday and Sunday in Conway, S.C., hosted by Coastal Carolina.

The NCAA limits a team’s ability to be in the Maui Invitational to one time every four years. Odom says that has helped when creating his fields, but he also doesn’t want to repeat the same field every four years.

He’s completed the tournament bracket through 2016 and is nearly done with 2017.

"I have two spots left for 2017," he said. "We like to hold spots for a few years down the road, look at teams who have proved their mettle during that time and have earned the right to play here."

The success of the event continues to amaze Lopes, who will be at this week’s tournament.

"Life is like this — where it goes, nobody knows," he said. "It just happens. That this has happened is an amazing thing.

"I give all the credit to (former Chaminade athletic director) Mike Vasconcellos, who had the vision, who wanted us to play these teams. We didn’t have money, we were struggling to make ends meet. We told them we can’t afford you, but they still wanted to come.

"When Mike told us we were going to play Virginia, I thought it wasn’t very smart, an NAIA school with 900 students. But he had his vision and it has ended up smelling like pikake."

Note
Oomba.tv will live-stream the 12 postgame press conferences as well as other off-the-court events, including this morning’s coaches press conference. The complete schedule is at oomba.tv/mauiinvitational/2013.