Women, girls knew pride and respect with Shoji

Yes, the record number of wins and all those championships. Yes, the thousands of fans who packed the arena and the decades of athletic excellence.

All those things make Dave Shoji a legend.

But there is another contribution Dave Shoji made to Hawaii — one that is hard to measure but impossible to ignore.

Shoji influenced the lives of women and girls who never played for him. For young girls with a dream of playing sports, his elite team of scholar athletes was something to aspire to. For women of all ages, he assembled a team of female athletes that we could root for — women who did not necessarily come from privilege, but who took whatever talents God had given them and honored those gifts with work and sacrifice. Even if you had never played a sport, you knew what it was like to work hard and dig deep, and when the Wahine were awesome and Shoji was covered in Silly String, that somehow made up for every time you tried and fell short or every time you didn’t even get the chance.

Shoji provided an example to men of how to work with women, how to talk about women, how to balance the power of authority with the wisdom of respect. He was not threatened by powerful women, and though he was strict, he did not seem threatening. His players over the years were such strong individuals — there was no one perfect Shoji Wahine — he worked with all kinds of female athletes, let them be their best selves, didn’t force anybody into a mold that didn’t fit.

He coached a women’s team that had legions of male fans — not because of how the girls looked, but because of how they played and how they won. Monday morning discussions about the Wahine were about toughness and skill and strategy, not about their outfits or their hairstyles. Think about how amazing that is, how revolutionary. And we lived through that without really noticing and without anybody having to push hard to make it so.

Patsy Mink fought to enact Title IX. Dave Shoji was like the field general making it happen.

Shoji ran a program that was without scandal for 42 seasons. When the Rainbow Wahine volleyball team made headlines, it was because they won a game, not because there was trouble.

Shoji often spoke in first-person plural: “We did this …” and “Our goal was …” rather than “I did this …” and “My goal was …” In news stories he’s often talking this way. And it’s not an affectation. It’s because he is thinking about his team and speaking on their behalf. Many times it’s because he’s including his wife, Mary, in the “we.”

Dave Shoji would not like this column. He would say it was only about the game and the players all those years and that he wasn’t thinking about the status of women or such lofty political, social things. But that’s what makes his example so beautiful, isn’t it? He wasn’t trying. He was doing.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.