Tayana Mata’s living the dream

Tayana Mata has heard it all over the years.

The chuckles, the snickering, the “what the heck?” comments coming out of the opposing dugout.

Punctuating her swing with a primal yell tends to draw a reaction … and she’s OK with that now.

“At first I was, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re laughing at me,’ ” Mata said. “But now I’m just ‘Whatever.’ Everyone does it.”

Mata added the vocal dimension to her swing around middle school and her bat drowned out much of the background noise last week when she hit .556 and drove in four pivotal runs in the University of Hawaii softball team’s series win at UC Riverside.

The senior second baseman came off the bench and singled in the tying run in the sixth inning and the go-ahead run in the eighth in UH’s 5-3 win on April 15. The next day she drove in two more runs in a 3-2 series-clinching victory and was named Big West Field Player of the Week on Monday.

“When she started doing it at Riverside all of them started making fun of her,” UH coach Bob Coolen said, “and she started lambasting the ball and the giggles and laughs were gone.”

Mata will try to carry the momentum of last week’s road trip into UH’s three-game series against conference leader Cal State Fullerton starting today at Rainbow Wahine Softball Stadium. The Wahine (20-22, 4-5 Big West) and Titans (35-10, 9-0) open the series with a single game at 6 p.m. and play a doubleheader on Saturday starting at 2 p.m.

Playing for her “dream school,” Mata is heading toward the end of a softball career that began at age 5 with her distinctive grunt added to her swing when she was “around 12 or 13.”

Her father, Curtis, trained in karate and would bring concepts from the dojo to Tayana’s hitting sessions, including finishing her swing with a kind of kiai to generate more power.

“He said that when you break the wood you have to breathe out so that you’re strong and relaxed,” Mata said. “When I started to do it (in softball), I tried to breathe out and it became a grunt and it just stuck.”

She stayed with it through championship runs at Vista Del Lago High and Sierra College in Northern California, where she hit .458 and was named to the NFCA CalJC All-America North Team in 2014.

Along the way, Hawaii beckoned as a goal that crystallized when she watched UH play in the 2010 Women’s College World Series. Thus started a series of calls to Coolen beginning in her sophomore year of high school.

“I kept calling him and kept calling him. He was probably irritated by me, but I wanted to come here that badly,” Mata said.

When she was admitted to UH coming out of Sierra, “I cried.”

“I was really happy that I finally made my dream come true,” Mata said. “Not many people back home can say ‘I went to my dream school.’ I’m one of the lucky ones.”

Accentuating the softball aspect, attending UH gave Mata a chance to connect with her island heritage. Curtis graduated from Hilo High School and has worked in the Folsom, Calif., fire department for nearly 30 years.

“My dad taught us the Hawaiian style when we were younger,” said Mata, who has an older brother and a younger sister. “So I knew some of the stuff when I got here so I wasn’t too haole.”

The transition to the speed of Division I softball was a bit rougher. Mata hit .159 in 40 games last year. She’s started 23 games in 31 appearances this season and said she’s felt more like her old self in the box of late.

“I came in last year and not doing so well … it was a confidence downer,” she said. “This year I feel like I’m back in my groove and feel I’m back as that player I was at my JC.”

Mata is on track to graduate with a degree in family resources next month and said she’s “trying to enjoy the game because it’s my last year ever playing.”

“So I’m going to enjoy it instead of putting so much pressure on myself. Just see ball, hit ball. This game is simple, we make it complicated.”