At first there were quizzical, uncomprehending looks.

Players would look at each other for clues and then at their coach as if expecting subtitles.

Only then would Kamehameha Schools head football coach David Stant realize he was doing it again: lapsing into rapid-fire Japanese on the field.

Eighteen years in Japan, as head coach or advisor to the top industrial league teams, had given Stant an ease with the language, especially when it came to football.

Even after three seasons at the Kapalama Heights campus now, in moments of excitement or stress, Stant acknowledges, "I kick back into Japanese, sometimes."

Times like this week, for example, as his 11-1 Warriors prepare for Kahuku, his alma mater, in the First Hawaiian Bank State Football Championships Division I game Friday night at Aloha Stadium.

When there is a terse "nani o shiteru?" (what are you doing?) the players might not know the direct translation, but they have come to get the message.

It got to the point a while back, after so much repetition, that when the 46-year-old Stant would bark "tsumasaki!" (toes), they'd automatically rise to the balls of their feet.

In the seven years of the HHSAA football championships it is hard to imagine a more circuitous or unconventional road to the title game than the one trod by Stant, who hadn't coached high school football until coming to Kamehameha Schools where he is 21-10-1.

A walk-on at UH, where he eventually earned a starting berth as a 5-foot-10, 235-pound defensive lineman, helping the Warriors to their first bowl appearance in 1989, Stant fell into coaching by fortuitous accident. He was recruited to play in an industrial league in Japan but when he got there they decided there would be no foreign players after all and made him an assistant coach instead.

Stant became so good at it, improving his Japanese along the way, that he eventually became a head coach, commanding $250,000 a year in salary and corporate perks while leading Recruit and IBM to three Japan Super Bowl titles.

When he decided to return home, becoming a substitute teacher and high school coach, people questioned his sanity. "June (Jones) told me, 'why do you want to come home when you have it made in Japan?' " Stant recalls.

What he wanted was for his four children, including Kawika, a linebacker for the Warriors, to finish growing up here. "It was time to come home," Stant said.

Funny thing, though, in three years of substitute teaching, nobody has yet asked him to teach a Japanese class.