Keeping An Eye On Kalani High

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Coach Shannon Hirai

Within the Kalani baseball program, the process of finding your way into the lineup isn’t entirely tied to on-field performance.

Head coach Shannon Hirai always is on the lookout for those who are the “solid citizens, first.“Actually, Hirai is on the lookout, period, as he works security at Kalani during the school day.

“It makes it hard on my players,” Hirai joked. “I’ll find out if they’re messing up.”

Some, Hirai admitted, he may know by his own experience. As a youth - before he became sufficiently serious about sports and before he was Kalani’s quarterback and baseball pitcher, he left his mark on Niu Intermediate (which was then across from the family home).

He was accumulating marks there anyway. “I used to get in trouble a lot in school - fights and stuff. Sports got me to finish school and get good grades. You needed grades to play sports, and sports got me to behave.”

Hirai is a permanent fixture at Kalani even without the daytime security job. He has been coaching baseball there since 1989, when he joined then-coach Jason Tanaka as an assistant and has been the head coach since 1998. Hirai also has coached football for the Falcons off-and-on during that span and is currently on Greg Taguchi’s staff as a wide receiver/quarterback coach.

He wasn’t at spring football practice the last couple weeks, however, while he coaches the baseball team this summer in American Legion League.

His schedule for the next six weeks is all baseball, with two games a day on many days between coaching Kalani in ALL as well as coaching in the Hawaii Collegiate Baseball League.

“I’m at the park all day. I always liked sports, but I was not very good. Without the support of my parents (Stanley and Toni), I would-n’t have been a coach. My dad took me to a lot of games. We used to go watch UH, then we’d go to a high school game (the same weekend).”

In Hirai’s sophomore year at Kalani, then-head JV coach Troy Kishida talked him into coming out for baseball. “I couldn’t hit the side of a barn,” he said. “I threw hard, but I wasn’t a very good pitcher.”

While a junior, Hirai and Kalani made the school’s first state tournament appearance in baseball since the 1970s.

Hirai improved steadily and eventually earned a baseball scholarship to Hawaii Pacific University. A recurring knee injury ended his baseball career, but he quickly found his way back to the game through coaching at Kalani.

“I enjoy working with the players. Sports kept me out of trouble when I was young, and it was a way for me to travel all over. I started at Kalani just helping out, but I enjoyed it, so I never stopped going. The program gave me a lot of opportunities - it got me a scholarship to HPU - and I like giving back and seeing the kids improve.”

His penchant for mischief as a youngster makes him “a little more strict” when working security, he admitted. His coaching style, meanwhile, comes from his own former coaches. “I had good coaches when I was growing up,” he said, listing Sparky Sagawa, Bert Kobayashi and Dunn Muramaru among those in his influence roster.

In addition to three state tournaments and a pair of OIA East titles, the Falcons also sent their share of players on to college in recent years, which pleases Hirai the most. A favorite story is the personal triumph of a former player who was “headed in the wrong direction.”

“He went from barely being a 2.0 GPA student to a 3.5 to 4.0 student his last two years, and he got a scholarship and graduated from college in four years.”