Retiring Coach Will Still Coach

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A lifetime in coaching means Mark Kane can always count on crossing paths with a former player on the Windward side, often on the way out of a store.

“I don’t remember too many games,” he said. “But the reward for coaching that long is seeing the people - they’re adults now, some are 50 - around town. The last few years I was coaching people whose parents I’d coached. It’s nice to be part of the continuum of things. There were a lot of great players and great people.”

Kane started both the boys and girls soccer programs at Castle in 1972 and 1979, respectively, and was the head football coach there for 13 memorable seasons. He also was head track coach for a time.

With his retirement beginning June 1 after 40 years in the DOE, Kane also retired from the head girls soccer job, which he had held since 1996 (and earlier from 1979 to 1983) . Fall term will mark the first time in 33 years, in fact, that Kane isn’t the head coach of something at the school. Besides turning out competitive teams, he also advanced interest in soccer within the community by way of tutoring good coaches, most notably David Trifonovitch, who led a Kane-coached Castle team to an OIA title in 1980 and is now head coach at Punahou.

For Kane, there was no direct line to becoming so visible in the soccer community. A football player at Saint Louis School and later in college in Oregon, he had only played one season of prep soccer. Yet he was assigned to head the first boys soccer team by then-Castle athletic director Wayne Sakamoto in 1972.

“He told me, ‘We need a soccer coach, and you’re going to be the soccer coach,’” he recalled. “I had to learn the game from the ground up.”

An earlier effort to promote soccer had met with little success. When AYSO came to Hawaii in 1974, Kane sought to form a Kaneohe youth team. “I sat out at Foodland for, like, five weeks, and five kids signed up,” he said. “Eventually we had six from Kaneohe and five from Kailua, and we had an under-16-boys team, which was the first team from this area.”

A chance meeting with Sal Marti, a former pro soccer player from Spain, helped Kane grasp the game. “He was really good (at soccer), but he didn’t speak English well, so we taught him to talk and he taught us how to play soccer.”

Castle’s first boys soccer team went 1-11 in 1972. “We won by forfeit. Kaimuki missed their bus and could-n’t make it,” Kane explained.

In 1980, with Trifonovitch and fellow team leader Jose Dydasco in the fold, the Knights won the OIA and came back to take runner-up honors in1981 as well as placing fourth in the state.

Kane’s girls teams also enjoyed success, going nearly four seasons without a defeat from 1979 to 1983. They won the OIA every year in that span, an unbeaten string that lasted until the 1983 state championship game, when they were defeated by Punahou, losing 5-4 on penalty kicks.

“That was hard,” he admitted, “but we had a fabulous time, and we were extremely successful.”

During Kane’s run as football coach, he also was track coach for many years - by design. “(Former coach and athletic director) Don Mahi, my mentor, always told me that if you were going to be the football coach, you needed to be the track coach, too. He thought it developed speed and quickness.”

Kane lists Kurt Mench and Bryan Clay among the top Knights during his time there. Mench set the record he still owns for running the fastest mile in 1979, while Clay, whom Kane called “a one-ina-million-athlete,” won an Olympic Gold Medal for the U.S. as a decathlete in 2008.

Kane, who also coached the HPU women’s team for 12 seasons, will continue coaching youth soccer and also train coaches for AYSO.

“I’d like to thank the parents in the community for allowing me to coach their sons and daughters,” he added. “I hope they got as much out of it as I did. I got a lot out of it.”