Switching to football paid off for Chang

By Stephen Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Fun facts about University of Hawai'i quarterback Tim Chang:

• As a seventh grader at St. Louis School, he tried out for the football team as a defensive back.

• His favorite sport isn't football. "I love basketball more, but football paid the way," he said.

• He leaves his house in Mililani Mauka at 5:15 every morning to make it to the Warriors' early-bird practices, and doesn't return home until 7 at night.

• He probably wouldn't be the Warriors' starting quarterback or yesterday's recipient of the award as the Western Athletic Conference's Offensive Player of the Week if the Kamehameha Schools had not rejected his application for admission. He had wanted to play only basketball at Kamehameha.

"Going to St. Louis," he said, "turned out to be the best decision of my life. Thank you Kamehameha."

Yesterday, Chang, 21, reflected on the maze of his life that eventually led to his emergence as the league's best quarterback.

He recalled following his father, Levi, who moonlighted as an Interscholastic League of Honolulu referee, to football games at Aloha Stadium and Cooke Field. He would play on the sideline, and several times was scolded when a stray pass landed on the field.

"The ushers used to tell us not to throw the ball," he recalled.

Chang said he learned the sport from his cousin, David Searle, a former Pac-Five quarterback. As a Maryknoll School student, Searle lived with the Changs, setting up games of street football on Upai Place in Waipi'o Gentry — "It was a big lane," Chang recalled — and in the house late at night.

During many of the bedroom football games, "I remember him just knocking me with his elbows and shoulders," Chang said. "I'd be crying, and he'd put the pillow over my head so my parents wouldn't hear. He made me tougher. I learned a lot from him."

Chang said he was determined to attend Kamehameha, where his older sister, Leighann, was the student body president. He applied when he was a sixth-grader at Noelani elementary school in Manoa, but received a "Sorry, but ..." letter.

He then applied to St. Louis, and was immediately accepted. Because of his late birthday, in October, his parents requested that he repeat the sixth grade at St. Louis. "They wanted me to mature more," Chang said of his first "redshirt" year.

Chang made St. Louis' intermediate team as a seventh-grader, but did not play in a game that year. He started in the eighth grade, and every year since, including the final regular-season game of his sophomore year, when quarterback Jason Gesser (now Washington State starting quarterback) was injured.

Chang had wanted to focus more on basketball, but while plotting his future, he figured football was a wiser long-term choice.

"It was an easy decision," he said. "It was: What was going to pay my way to college? It was going to be football. I put most of my eggs into football. I trained six or seven months out of the year."

In 2000, he turned down several offers from Mainland schools to attend UH on a football scholarship. Now Chang can't imagine what life would be like without football.

"Football," he said, "has been a good investment."