The outside temperature was minus five degrees in Waltham, Mass., a December night in 1989 when Bob Coolen picked up an office phone at Bentley University that would change his life and University of Hawaii softball.
Things warmed up quickly when the caller, new UH softball head coach Rayla Allison, offered him a position as her assistant with the Rainbow Wahine.
In congratulating his friend Allison weeks before on her ascension to the UH job, Coolen recalls telling her she “’was the luckiest person in the country.’”
Suddenly, “out of the blue,” Coolen felt some ownership of the title, too, a feeling that has faded little in his 30-year stay in Manoa, where he is a candidate to reach a milestone 1,000th UH victory this week as the Rainbow Wahine’s head coach.
Coolen is 997-608-1 in his 28th season as UH’s head coach and can become one of just four coaches in the school’s interscholastic history to reach the 1,000-victory level when the first-place Rainbow Wahine play a three-game Big West Conference series with UC Santa Barbara beginning Friday at Rainbow Wahine Softball Stadium.
Only Jim Schwitters in tennis, Les Murakami in baseball and Dave Shoji in volleyball have preceded him to that level at UH, the school said. Schwitters and Shoji, for a time, each coached men’s and women’s teams in their sports.
Coolen has already reached the 1,000 mark — 1,069-701-1 — in his overall career, including his stay at Bentley, and is second in seniority among the current UH head coaches, trailing only sailing’s Andy Johnson.
In that time he has taken a program in its infancy struggling to be competitive to long-haul consistency with 22 winning seasons over 27 years and is bidding for another, as well as a 12th NCAA tournament appearance and seventh conference crown, at 24-10 (5-1 in the Big West).
It is those last quests, more than the 1,000-win plateau, that occupy his thoughts this week, Coolen maintains. “I’m not counting (them) down,” he said. Other people, Coolen says, are doing enough of that for him. “I’m concentrating on the Big West, getting that automatic (NCAA tournament) berth.”
He praises the maturity and unselfishness of this year’s team, as well as their passion for the game, as being responsible for their sweep at Cal Poly over the weekend and 5-1 climb to a share of the Big West lead with defending champion Cal State Fullerton.
Over the years he has come up with a reliable recipe to keep his teams in contention, combining local talent with players from California and being among the first on campus to mine Australia for prospects.
Along the way he’s also had to practice a fair amount of patience. In the shadow of Murakami Stadium, he’s had to wait for Rainbow Wahine Stadium to get built and renovated. He still awaits a time when his players will no longer have to trek from locker rooms near Gym 2 to their stadium, getting one on the premises. And, the day when he has an office there, too.
There was a time when Coolen worried his stay at UH might be confined to just two years. When Allison pulled him aside at a coaching convention after the 1991 season and said she was leaving to run a national softball organization, Coolen said, “Right there my heart sank and my stomach got queasy.” With just a short time on the job, he didn’t know if he’d be asked to stay or even considered.
Coolen said, “Little did I know I’d still be sitting here (in 2019).”
CLUB 1,000
Coaches with 1,000 career victories at UH
COACH / SPORT / RECORD / SEASONS
Jim Schwitters Tennis 1,327-610-15* 1966-2004
Dave Shoji Volleyball 1,269-241-1* 1971-2016
Les Murakami Baseball 1,079-570-4 1971-2001
*— Includes wins with both women’s, men’s UH teams
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
