Coach Kimura: A Kind, Professional Approach To Sports
By Jack Danilewicz
E-mail this story | Print this page | Comments (0) | Archive | RSS | Share
Del.icio.usLong before he received word of the coach’s passing, this young man admired the older man for his kindness, his professionalism, his unwavering commitment to good sportsmanship and for producing teams year after year that over-achieved.
Coach Kimura, first name Wil, 59, had many more qualities, of course, but those are a good starting point for a young coach looking for direction.
In my many interviews with Coach Kimura, who passed away Dec. 16 in his sleep, his sense of fairness stood front and center. We both shared a distaste for the self-important coaches, over-involved parents and the poor displays of sports-manship that have soused the youth sports scene. Most notably, we were exasperated by the run-up-the-score crowd. In the spring, I watched a youth boys soccer team at Waipio rub it in on an outmatched opponent and thought of Wil. The better team had a 7-0 lead when it moved its best player (who had scored three goals of his own already) to goalkeeper midway through the second half. From there, every time he got his hands on the ball, he took off on a one-man scoring crusade. He wasn’t interested in sharing the ball with his teammates; he was only interested in proving that he could score on an inferior opponent from the goalie position.
I called Wil (and Castle coach Mark Kane) the next day to get his take on it.
“Disgusting,” he said. Yes, it was.
We used to share a lot of stories not unlike that one.
Scan the Kailua box scores, and you will find balanced scoring. That’s because when a game began to get out of hand in Kailua’s favor, Wil would switch things up so any scoring from there on in would be done by someone who hadn’t tallied yet.
Wil owns another unique distinction. He managed to win and still be liked. On this point, I am reminded of a young Bob Knight, the retired Indiana and Texas Tech basketball coach, who determined right after high school that he wanted to coach. When he told this to a friend, a longtime coach himself, Knight was asked, “Do you care if people like you?”
“Not really,” answered Knight, who relayed the story in his book co-written with Bob Hammel.
“Good,” said the man, “because if you want to be liked, don’t be a coach.”
That is true in most cases, but not Wil’s case. He was liked by his players, his fellow coaches and everyone whose path he intersected.
He once told me the best way to deal with the kids, as he saw it. No. 1, you can’t yell at the girls. Girls won’t respond to yelling.
No. 2, when making a point to one, address the issue with the entire team without ever mentioning the girl by name who the message was truly meant for. That way, he said, you wouldn’t embarrass the young lady.
His approach obviously produced great results. He left us with Kailua on a 15-game win streak against conference opponents.
What was most amazing about Wil is that none of the exasperating scenes we were privy to came from his own experience. He never had drama with kids or parents or the administration at Kailua. He had their full support. Always. (He also told me that the athletic directors he worked for at Kailua - Mel Imai and current A.D. Ramona Takahashi - wouldn’t tolerate interference from parents anyway.) As with Wil, the kids carried the day.
That is why he never retired from coaching. He tried a couple of years ago.
I wrote a story about it that ran in these pages, but he recognized his situation at Kailua was unique and stayed on.
When I would call him at the beginning of each season to preview Kailua, the interview invariably started the same way.“I have a great group of kids this year and great parents,” was his usual response.
When our interview of Dec. 16 ended, I glanced at my cell phone and found we’d been talking for 53 minutes, a long time for what would be a 10-inch story on girls soccer. I glanced at the clock on the cable box: 11:43. Better get back to work, I thought. What the young man did not yet know was that the older man’s own work was just about complete.
E-mail this story | Print this page | Comments (0) | Archive | RSS
Most Recent Comment(s):
