One item remains on Shoji's wish list
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
What do you give the man who now has just about everything?
By that, of course, we mean Dave Shoji, head coach of the No. 2-ranked University of Hawai'i Rainbow Wahine volleyball team.
His 57th birthday is Thursday, Christmas is still more than three weeks away and already a lot of the items at the top of his wish list have been crossed off. His Christmas stocking has been stuffed even before it could be hung out.
You won't see Shoji perched on Santa's knee down at the shopping mall or dashing off a letter to the North Pole. Not after the NCAA has seen to it that anything a man in his position could have reasonably wanted has already been granted:
A high seed (second) in the NCAA Tournament that starts Thursday. Check.
The host role for the first and second rounds. Check.
The host role for the regionals. Check.
Just one team in the USA Today/American Volleyball Coaches Association Poll Top 10 (No. 8 California) in his regional. Check.
The only things the NCAA didn't do were move the final four to Manoa or declare Southern California ineligible to defend its national title. But, then, how much fun would that have been?
The NCAA did, however, make USC's route to the final four run through Lincoln, Neb.
For a group that has sometimes seemed to take grinch-like delight in dropping a lump of coal into his stocking in particular — remember Pullman, Wash., in 2001? — and UH's in general, this NCAA selection committee did right by Hawai'i. Just don't count on it being an annual mistake.
So much so that the one regret — and it took some thinking — Shoji could come up with was that the Rainbow Wahine (32-1) drew Idaho (19-10) in the first round instead of a real Twinkie.
"This is the toughest first-round opponent of any of the top four seeds," Shoji maintains.
When you haven't added to the collection of national championship banners since 1987, there is an understandable desire to want to have everything go your way.
And, clearly, almost everything has. The way things have fallen into place, if the Rainbow Wahine take care of business over these next two weeks the way they have over these past three months, there is no reason this can't be a fast break to the final four.
If they perform in the next four matches as they have for the most part in the last 31, it is hard to imagine anybody in this region detouring the Rainbow Wahine from Dallas.
For it is only there that Shoji, the man who has almost everything going for him in this postseason, can capture the one thing he's really missing — an NCAA championship.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.
