Laying the foundation for UH baseball
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Read a transcript of last night's online live chat with Mike Trapasso |
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
While workmen renovate the first-floor offices, the University of Hawai'i baseball coaching staff operates out of makeshift facilities in the second-floor hospitality room.
Advertiser library photo • June 6, 2001
A new scoreboard is being hooked up in right-center field even as part of the right-field wall near the bullpen, flattened by recent high winds, is being repaired. The new Verizon Room, previously a storage corner in the visitors' locker room, has become a team study area outfitted with computers.
Mike Trapasso said a return to "glory days" is his goal.
Wherever he turns these days, UH baseball coach Mike Trapasso is surrounded by reminders that his is a program very much in transition and under construction.
And things aren't much different on the field, where the Rainbows still await the arrival of one hoped-for starting pitcher this weekend.
Indeed, from the pitching staff to the infield, there is, along with a rededication to fundamentals, an unmistakable work-in-progress feeling here. New players, new approaches and new ideas mixing with the past.
The "Dawn of a New Era" is how they're billing Trapasso's arrival at UH, a place of such rare baseball change that eras have only now come to qualify as plural.
For the previous 31 seasons — 18 played in the current 4,312-seat stadium configuration — the program was administered by the single, steady hand of Les Murakami and significant change was almost as rare as, well, losing seasons.
Now, in a stadium that will next week be officially christened with his predecessor's name, Trapasso — six months into the job from Georgia Tech — prepares to turn the page on the school's baseball history. Soon, ready or not, comes TrapBall, a defense, pitching and speed-oriented game the Rainbows have been dedicating themselves to since he signed on in June.
First up is the annual alumni game Saturday, then the season opener with No. 4 Florida State Wednesday, all of it something of an on-rushing blur.
"To me, it seems like the time has all gone so fast," Trapasso says. "You spend so much time immersed in the details that when you look up from your desk, all of a sudden, it is (less than) a week from opening day. But I'm excited about seeing what we can do right away to get started building this program back to its glory days."
Trapasso says, "The other day somebody asked me, 'Do you have a three-year, four-year or five-year plan?' I have a three-year contract, so it has to be a three-year plan."
Like their surroundings, these Rainbows are definitely a work in progress.
