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In my first column nearly seven months ago, I mentioned how copy editors are often compared to offensive linemen. We willingly put our egos aside in an effort to provide the best product we can for our readers, allowing the reporters and columnists to be the stars.
Sports editor Curtis Murayama’s decision to have us write columns about once a month has brought us out of the shadows a bit, but I’m happy to report I can still go to Costco without being approached very much (OK, without being approached at all). In the name of paying it forward, I’d like to use my platform this month to throw some attention toward a group perhaps even more unsung than our copy editors.
If the copy desk is the offensive line of the operation, the clerks and freelance reporters are … the scout team? They’re generally the younger contributors and often willing to do whatever is asked of them in an effort to win a more prominent role.
With high school football season wrapping up, it is a great time to note their contributions and share their stories with our readers, because they have played such vital roles in our coverage this season. The freelancers, in particular, have proven time and again their willingness to go the extra mile … literally, driving out to Oahu’s most distant W’s — Waianae, Waialua and Wherever the Heck Billy Hull and Paul Honda tell them to go for a game that needs to be covered.
Clerks, meanwhile, are responsible for one of the most read features in our section — the TV and radio listings. They also take care of much of the small type you see in our section — the calendar, event results, UH box scores).
In the past 20 years — covering the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s operations split from the Honolulu Advertiser and the merger 11 years ago — we’ve hired 30-plus clerks (we usually have four to six on staff at a time). Not all of them have been winners, but our hit rate’s been pretty good, with some of them going on to be full-time journalists — such as Hull, Stan Lee, Brian McInnis, Stefanie Nakasone and Christian Shimabuku — and others going on to success in diverse occupations including insurance agent, firefighter, school administrator and communications professional. No truth, however, to the rumor that Barack Obama once served as a clerk/media league basketball ringer.
So without further ado, and in no particular order, meet the clerks and freelancers.
Robert Yamashita has been with us as a clerk the longest, joining the Star-Bulletin in 2004, when he was just a couple of years out of ‘Iolani and working toward his management degree at UH Manoa. He’s probably the most athletically accomplished member of our clerk crew. Heck, he’s likely the most athletically accomplished on our entire staff, having won an individual state wrestling title in 2002.
I’ve known Robert so long that I’ve seen him move on from wrestling and judo to become a force on the basketball court and now an improving golfer. I’ve also seen him grow from a 20-year-old into a man doing some good things in this world — he recently received his master’s degree in social work and his full-time job is in case management and counseling at Windward Community College, helping students who are in the SNAP program and need financial support. He is considering adding a law degree so he can “become an advocate for disadvantaged populations” in Hawaii.
Noelle Kakimoto is another of our contributors trying to make the world a better place. The Kamehemeha and Baylor graduate is a full-time community outreach court coordinator who also works with Hawaii Peace and Justice part-time and is a co-founder of the Hawai‘i Abolition Collective, which is dedicated to “the abolition of the prison industrial complex.” She also volunteers with the College Guild.
That ambitious load prompted Noelle to leave the Star-Advertiser this year after serving as a clerk for much of the past two years, but she continues to make valuable contributions as a freelance reporter. You may have seen her byline both in our print edition and online at HawaiiPrepWorld.com during the recently completed high school football season.
Jonathan Chen also has contributed to our coverage — of both high schools and UH sports — while working as a clerk. He joined us around the same time Noelle did and is the youngest member of our staff, still pursuing his journalism degree at UH Manoa.
A football and lacrosse player at Tenafly High in New Jersey before coming to the islands, Jonathan joined us after extensive work at Ka Leo O Hawaii, UHM’s student newspaper, which many of our staff — including yours truly — worked at in college.
Jonathan’s favorite sport — “by far” — is football, but he is eyeing working overseas, where “football” is a different sport than it is here in the U.S., once he completes his degree.
Jeremy Nitta is another clerk who loves football, and he and Curtis have bonded over their specific love of the NFL Draft.
Jeremy, who played tennis and ran track at Damien, came to us about six years ago while still finishing up his journalism degree at UHM. He’s considering going back to school to add another diploma.
Kyle Sakamoto is our most experienced part-timer, which we’ve benefited from greatly. You’ve surely seen his name across the past two decades, dating back to the pre-merger Advertiser, covering pretty much every sport you see on our pages. His favorite is baseball, which he played at McKinley High along with basketball, but he’s also covered football, basketball, paddling, you name it. If we decided to start covering pickleball, I’m sure Kyle would do a great job at it.
He’s a real pro, which is no surprise given that his father was the late Gordon Sakamoto, a journalism legend who I was fortunate enough to meet even before I knew Kyle, back when Gordon anchored the local Associated Press office for many years. (The only bad thing I have to say about Kyle is that he doesn’t like Prince. Admittedly, that’s a serious character flaw, but his positive traits more than make up for it.)
Kyle, who also worked two-plus years for The Maui News, has been with the city desk for the past few years — while still helping us out as a writer — but we’re getting him back all to ourselves shortly.
As happy as I am that we’ll be working with Kyle more, I have mixed feelings about why: The clerk I’ve known longest, Tiff Wells, is leaving us at year’s end.
Tiff often hung out in the Star-Bulletin newsroom in 2001, when his mom, Cindy Luis, was sports editor. He was still in high school at ‘Iolani then and was innocent enough to be impressed when I “predicted” Cal Ripken Jr. would homer in his last All-Star Game.
After graduating from ‘Iolani, where he played volleyball and basketball, Tiff went away to Pepperdine to major in telecommunications and broadcast news, before coming back and working as a clerk for us starting in 2009.
Of course, many of you know Tiff as the radio voice of UH volleyball and analyst for Rainbow Wahine basketball on KKEA, where he also works full-time as traffic manager for KKEA and KHKA. That’s not the traffic so many of us deal with each day, though. In radio a traffic manager’s job is to “generate daily program logs and manage on-air inventory of ads,” Tiff tells me. (Despite being a radio guy, Tiff has a face for TV, though he declined to provide a picture to run with this column.)
Add to Tiff’s full workload that he got married this summer and he has plenty of good reasons not to want to spend a dozen hours or so each week wrangling TV and radio listings for us. We’ve been lucky to have him as long as we have. I’m happy for him that he gets to spend more time with his wife, Taryn, but sad that we are losing him.
Besides being a reliable, diligent clerk, we’ve known Tiff as a dead-eye 3-point shooter in our Saturday basketball games in Manana back a decade or so, but most of all as a friend to us all.
Getting Kyle back takes away from of the sting of losing Tiff, but when it comes right down to it, we’re still losing Tiff. I guess the biggest silver lining is that our loss is Taryn’s gain, as well as Tiff’s.
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