‘I want to coach’

He drives by the Kalani High School football practice field every day, on his way to visit his parents in Aina Haina. He knows the coach, and that the team uses the offensive scheme with which he is intimately familiar and forever linked.

So one day he pulls into the parking lot and watches. The next day he does the same thing. “But it’s kind of hard to see it from the car,” he says.

Within a few days, Ron Lee—a year ago the coordinator for the yard-chomping University of Hawaii football team’s run-and-shoot offense—has joined the Kalani staff as a full-time volunteer coach.

The Falcons haven’t won a varsity game since 2004.

“This goes beyond X’s and O’s because of what an outstanding person and teacher Ron is,” says Greg Taguchi, a former Kalani running back on his third tour of duty as Falcons head coach. “The players know who he is. Our kids are stable and don’t show much emotion. But I sure hope they know they have an opportunity.”

Lee downplays it, but plenty of local high school coaches would have been elated to bring him on as an adviser or onto their staff. Teams that are contenders for the state championship. Teams with numbers and size. Teams that haven’t lost nearly 50 games in a row.

SO WHY KALANI? And why, at 66, continue to coach at all after the way he was marginalized at UH?