It’s homecoming. Are you ready to party like it’s 1999?
The University of Hawaii football team was 0-12 in 1998 and 9-4 including a win in the Oahu Bowl over Oregon State the next season.
The current Rainbow Warriors have a long way to go to match the accomplishments of the edition that made the biggest turnaround in college football history.
But the situation and the attitude are similar, as UH is now 3-3 under first-year head coach Nick Rolovich. He took over after four seasons of futility under Norm Chow ended last year with a 3-10 mark, including 0-8 in the Mountain West Conference. The ’Bows are 2-0 in the league as they host UNLV on Saturday.
The 1998-99 turnaround was accomplished with mostly the same players as were on the roster the previous season. The biggest change was a new coaching staff, headed by June Jones.
Now, other than sophomore quarterback Dru Brown (who is 2-0 since becoming the starter), the most noteworthy change from the 2015 lineup is a deletion, that of defensive lineman Kennedy Tulimasealii.
Tulimasealii was widely considered the best player on last year’s team, but he’s off it due to a highly publicized violation of UH’s student-athlete code in the offseason.
Since I was away from home in 1998 and 1999, I asked someone who was a part of the program then and now to compare the vibes. He said they’re quite alike.
“The first thing that happened with June was the same as with Rolo,” said Craig Stutzmann, a UH receiver from 1998 to 2001 and now the quarterbacks coach and passing game coordinator. “They both worked on healing the team in terms of getting to know one another.
“Things were very similar. In ’99 Coach Jones and his staff made it a point to tell the local guys to show the other guys around, show them the culture. It was very powerful. We’re doing the same thing. And we’re recruiting kids who want to be here, rather than this being the only option.”
At the end of the 1998 and 2015 seasons, the program had hit rock-bottom. Hawaii went 5-31 in three seasons under Fred vonAppen and then — after climbing to the apex of 12-1 in 2007 under Jones — gradually declined to 11-39 after four years of Chow.
“When I got here with Rolo (last spring) it felt similar (to 1998) because there were a lot of cracks in the foundation of what makes a team a team,” Stutzmann said. “There were a lot of cliques, the team was fractured.”
Rolovich has employed some of the ways Jones built team unity. One is locker assignments that make neighbors of players who normally might rarely interact.
“Before and after practice are critical times for players to get to know teammates,” Stutzmann said.
“It’s like ’99 now that guys have a smile on their faces when they’re in the football facility, on the plane, in the hotel,” Stutzmann said. “They’re genuinely enjoying each other’s company.”
Of course winning has a lot to do with that. But without the unity this team wouldn’t be winning.
A group of players that was sick of losing 17 years ago got a re-start with a new coaching staff, became a solid team and made history.
No one knows how far it will take them, but the 2016 Rainbow Warriors have found their way onto a similar path.
