HPU coach planted seeds to a fruitful program

Nearly a quarter century ago, when somebody offered Howard Okita a bunch of Norfolk pine seedlings in gallon cans for his fledgling softball field, Okita jumped at the opportunity, envisioning a lot more than outfield greenery.

He saw something that would become symbolic of the Hawaii Pacific University softball program he was building.

In having the players plant the then-knee-high seedlings, which they affixed their names to and cared for, there would be lessons in the diligence of doing spade work and reaching for the sky.

Okita’s “field of dreams,” on the former Hawaii Loa campus in Kaneohe, as his right-hand man and successor, Bryan Nakasone, called it “was not only grass and dirt, but it was all the players and to get them to dream big and work hard to see it through.”

The trees, some of them now rising 60 feet or more, and the nearly 100 local players who earned degrees attest to the legacy of Okita, who died Friday at age 81.

He brought Hawaii its first national championship in softball and won hundreds of games, but “Coach O,” as he was known to a couple of generations of players, took as much pride in helping them get tuition waivers and seeing dozens of them leave with degrees.

Indeed, asked to describe his proudest moments, Okita would often say, “I know I’ve been to a lot of graduations.”

Okita found his way into the coaching box by happenstance, agreeing to help coach the Kailua T-ball team of a neighbor’s son in 1963. After his work hours ended with the Hawaii Air National Guard at Hickam, where he was a chief master sergeant, he’d race to the Windward side and one diamond or another. After T-Ball it was little league, where he coached Sid Fernandez, and then softball.

All the while preaching good defense and the importance of an education.

He piloted Kailua High to six state championships and eight OIA titles before then athletic director Al Minn took Okita with him to found the Hawaii Loa College program. Okita went 125-65 and won the 1991 NAIA national championship with just 12 players, 11 of them from Hawaii, for which he was named NAIA coach of the year.

When Hawaii Loa and HPU merged in 1993, Okita served as an assistant for a year before taking over the Sharks (then-Sea Warriors) program, where he went 505-211-3 and won three PacWest championships.

Although he “retired” following the 2008 season, Okita never really left HPU, serving as an assistant to Nakasone for another five years, including the 2010 NCAA Division II national championship run, and performing various functions thereafter as a coach emeritus.

“Coach O was a building block of the HPU athletic program, he has done so much for the HPU ohana and for softball on Oahu and the state of Hawaii,” said Vince Baldemor, HPU executive director of athletics. “He was always a man for whom actions spoke louder than words.”

Right up until the time he was hospitalized last month with what would be diagnosed as leukemia, Okita presided over the care and maintenance of the field — Howard A. Okita Field — that had come to carry his name. “He’d sit there in a golf cart and tell us what to do,” Nakasone said. “He was the luna.”

When HPU decided to name the field after him in 2009, Okita tried to demur on the honor. But officials would not back down.

“That,” Baldemor said, “was his field. When you look at it, you think of him and some of what he meant to HPU.”