It’s been a long dry spell, but the University of Hawaii is going to win another sports national championship.
It’s going to happen, eventually. Maybe during my lifetime or, more likely, yours.
It could even be this year, within the coming week.
The men’s volleyball team is among the final six, playing in the NCAA tournament starting Tuesday in Columbus, Ohio. The competition will be tough, and UH would have to win one more match than the two favorites who have byes, Ohio State and Long Beach State. But the Rainbow Warriors should be favored in their opener, as No. 3-ranked Hawaii (26-5) plays 12th-rated Penn State (21-10).
UH’S NCAA TEAM CHAMPIONSHIPS
Women’s volleyball 1982
Women’s volleyball 1983
Women’s volleyball 1987
Men’s volleyball 2002*
OTHER NATIONAL TEAM CHAMPIONSHIPS
AIAW
Women’s volleyball 1979
ICSA
Women’s sailing 2001
Coed sailing 2004
* later vacated
On Saturday, the UH beach volleyball team won the Big West championship for the second year in a row. The SandBows, who are ranked sixth nationally and have won 11 of their past 12 matches, find out today if they make the NCAA tournament, which starts Friday in Gulf Shores, Ala. (UH, which is 26-5 in beach volleyball, too, should be a lock. But you never know.)
Volleyball is a sport where Hawaii is consistently excellent. Whether it be women’s indoor or beach or men’s, a national championship should always be a goal.
And it has often been a realistic one, historically. But achieving that ultimate goal has been elusive.
Depending on how you look at it, it’s been seven, 13, 15 or 30 years since UH’s last national championship, in any sport.
Amber Kaufman — a moonlighting Rainbow Wahine volleyball player — won the NCAA title in the high jump at the 2010 NCAA outdoor track and field championships.
OK, you say, but that’s an individual. For a team national championship, the most recent was in 2004 for coed sailing. But you’re still shaking your head, since that’s not an NCAA title — it’s from the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association.
Our next stop is 2002, when UH won the NCAA men’s volleyball championship by beating Pepperdine in a four-set final. Except we can’t count that one (or, we’re not supposed to) because the NCAA stripped the Warriors of the title. Star outside hitter Costas Theocharidis had played with a professional team (though, he said, without payment) in his native Greece prior to enrolling at UH.
The banner is down, the trophy is gone. But in the hearts and minds of Hawaii fans, that championship was still won, and still exists.
But if you want to be a stickler, it’s all the way back to 1987 for UH’s last NCAA championship in a team sport that remains in the record books as such. That was the fourth national title won by one of Dave Shoji’s volleyball teams.
An undersized team captained by 5-foot-8 Tita Ahuna and starring future Olympian Teee Williams beat Stanford in the final.
Other teams came close before and since. Baseball provided the most notable one that got away, when it had two chances to win the College World Series in 1980, but Arizona beat the Rainbows in both games.
Women’s volleyball has come close, often. It made it to the final again in 1988, but lost to Texas. In 1995, the Wahine started out 29-0, but Michigan State knocked them off in a regional final. The next year, Stanford beat Hawaii in the championship match. UH made it to the final four in women’s volleyball three times from 2000 to 2003, and again in 2009.
In 2010, the UH softball team broke the national record for home runs in a season and advanced to the Women’s College World Series. But after winning its series opener against Missouri, Hawaii lost to UCLA and Arizona in the double-elimination tournament.
With all that being said, you might think UH is snake-bitten in sports.
But Hawaii will win it all again, and it will probably be in some form of volleyball.
Someday, maybe even this week.
