Botelho retiring as A.D. at Mid-Pacific Institute

By Dennis Anderson
Advertiser Staff Writer

Don Botelho will retire as athletic director of Mid-Pacific Institute in August but will continue to coach Pac-Five football, he said yesterday.

"I plan on dying on the job (as football coach)," he said.

Botelho has been a high school athletic director for 35 years and a football coach for 41 years on O'ahu. He is in his 28th year at Mid-Pacific in both roles.

Botelho said he would remain on some state and national committees, but would relinquish the daily administration of Mid-Pacific's more than 85 boys and girls teams. A search committee, on which Botelho will serve, will select a new athletic director this spring, he said.

"I've been going a hundred miles an hour for 40 years. I can cut down to 80 now," Botelho said. "I've always wanted to be a full-time football coach and now I can."

He said the highlight of his years as athletic director have been "every day when I come to work, because I enjoy being around athletics and athletes."

Botelho was athletic director for seven years and football coach for nine years at Damien prior to taking over at Mid-Pacific in 1973.

The Pac-Five football team he coaches is a conglomeration of players from five or more small schools in the Interscholastic League of Honolulu which do not have enough players to field teams of their own. Botelho's teams won ILH and O'ahu Prep Bowl championships in 1982 and 1985 — the last year any team but St. Louis won the league title.

Botelho graduated from Roosevelt in 1950 and the University of Hawai'i in 1958, with military service intervening. He was an assistant football coach at UH for four years before starting his high school career as a head coach "without a break."

Botelho was inducted into the University of Hawai'i Circle of Honor (UH's athletics hall of fame) in 2000 and has received a citation from the National Federation of High School Associations, one of the highest awards for contributions to high school athletics.