To understand how Rainbow Wahine volleyball has won 1,000 matches you have to go back almost 40 years with three men, a women's athletic director with a vision involving an impending federal law called Title IX, and a few University of Hawai'i students who wanted to be student-athletes.

Dave Shoji was one of those men. He is now in his 35th year as head coach of the fourth-ranked Rainbow Wahine, who play 25th-ranked Pepperdine tonight and tomorrow. If Hawai'i wins every match between now and Oct. 14, Shoji will become the second in his sport with 1,000 victories.

The program won its 1,000th match Saturday. Fittingly, it came with a sweep of six-time NCAA champion Stanford, one of four schools to have won more than Manoa's four national titles.

The first nine victories came under the guidance of Alan Kang in 1974, the first year the team actually left Hawai'i. Kang started the program in the summer of 1972. He worked in the intramural department and initially was there only to put up the nets at steamy Klum Gym. But the first guy who was supposed to coach quit and Kang was hired.

He went to a few high schools and encouraged players to come out and join the women already playing intramurals in Manoa. And he taught himself to coach.

"I knew nothing about volleyball," recalled Kang, whose late wife Ann played for UH in 1976 and '77 and later coached 'Iolani, where one of the country's best high school tournaments is named in her memory. "I used to go to the Nu'uanu and Central Y's to watch teams practice. When players came to town they'd invariably show up at Klum to play at lunch. I'd talk to them and Chris (McLachlin) and I taught myself to coach.

"This was not a plan of mine. These young women wanted to play I thought they should play and Donnis Thompson needed a vehicle to plead her case with the athletic department to justify getting money. Fortunately we had success early and it gave her that vehicle."

McLachlin and Thompson, the original UH women's athletic director who passed away this February, were the other major players. The student-athletes back then were people like Joey Akeo, Linda Fernandez, Joyce (Kapua'ala) Ka'apuni, Beth McLachlin, Oveta Pua'a and Marilyn Moniz-Kaho'ohanohano — the first four-year letterwinner in the women's department and current UH Associate AD/Senior Woman Administrator.

For two years the team played community colleges here in the fall and USVBA tournaments in the spring, winning the "A" championship in 1973 and "AA," or Open, the following year.

A few months later, on its first Mainland trip, Hawai'i lost to UCLA in the AIAW championship match at Portland. It would finish in the top three nationally its first five years before breaking through to win the school's first national championship in 1979, with Kang still involved as an assistant.

"It worked out that Hawai'i kids were just better skill-wise," Kang said. "Most of the Mainland teams had the proverbial tomboys that wanted to play but were not really athletic. The tall ones were gawky and didn't move well. Although we were smaller, our skills and athletic ability were better and that allowed us to win. Then we ran into UCLA, which had some taller girls that were athletic. We couldn't handle them."

Thompson wanted McLachlin, now KFVE's volleyball color analyst, to be head coach in 1975. The Punahou graduate, who was player/coach for Stanford's club team four years, was back in Hawai'i, teaching and coaching at Punahou. In the summers he helped the national program, where his wife — Rainbow Wahine Beth McLachlin — and Ka'apuni were training.

He took over in the spring, but couldn't afford to live on the salary and eventually turned the position down to stay at Punahou. The money looked good to Shoji, who had two other part-time jobs and just wanted to earn enough to move out of his parents' house.

He was also something of a player/coach in his college days at UC Santa Barbara, and was back home looking for work and coaching at Kalani and Punahou when McLachlin sent Thompson in his direction.

That was 991 wins ago.

NOTES

Alan and Ann Kang's twins are scheduled to graduate from Occidental in May. Marci Kang was an All-West Region soccer player last year and is now team captain. She hopes to go into medical research, and find a cure for ALS, the illness that took her mother's life in 2003. Barry Kang is applying to medical schools and hopes to specialize in orthopedics.

Sophomore Kanani Danielson is featured in the Sept. 21 issue of Sports Illustrated in "Faces in the Crowd" for her performance the first week of the season, at the Rainbow Wahine Invitational.