Dave Shoji enters his 42nd season as head coach of the Rainbow Wahine. In 2016, he led UH to a 29-2 overall record; a 16-0 mark to win its eighth Big West title thus advancing to its 34th trip to the NCAA Tournament. Shoji became the all-time winningest coach in NCAA Division I women’s volleyball history with his 1,107th victory on Sept. 6, 2013 against Santa Clara. Currently he is ranked No. 2 in the NCAA behind Penn State’s Russ Rose (1,189) with a career record of 1,179-198-1.
The honors have piled up for Shoji over the years. In addition to being a member of the AVCA Hall of Fame, he is an 13-time conference and nine-time region Coach of the Year, and was named the National Coach of the Year in 1982 and in 2009. Shoji was named to the list of all-time great coaches by USA Volleyball in 2002. He has also been inducted into the Hawai‘i Sports Hall of Fame and was named coach of the NCAA 25th Anniversary team.
In 1975, a young Shoji took over the reins of the UH women’s volleyball program. He was just 28 years old with no clue that he would turn a one-year-old program into a national powerhouse over the next four decades. The team was coming off a 9-1 campaign in 1974 that ended with the Rainbow Wahine falling to UCLA in the national title match at the AIAW (Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women) Championship.
In Shoji’s first four years at the helm of the program, he took the team to two more national title matches before he finally broke through to take the title in 1979 with a five-game victory over Utah State in the AIAW finals. It was the school’s first-ever team national championship and a sign of great things to come for the young program.
In 1981, Shoji became UH’s first full-time coach for a women’s program. He led the team to another national title, this time in the new NCAA Tournament in 1982, beating the USC Women of Troy in a come-from-behind five-game thriller. Shoji would lead the team to another title in 1983 with a straight-set win over UCLA, becoming the first school to win back-to-back NCAA championships.
The Rainbow Wahine again returned to the national championship match in 1987, capping a 37-2 season with a sweep of Stanford for the program’s fourth national title and third NCAA title. The team lost to Texas in the 1988 national championship match, then went through a stretch of five frustrating losses in six years to rival Long Beach State in the NCAA Regionals, holding them out of the NCAA Championships.
UH looked primed to return to the Final Four in 1995, going through the season undefeated at 29-0. After winning their regional match over Arizona State, Hawai‘i was set for a national championship run. But Michigan State dealt a heart-breaking blow to those plans, coming back from being down two games to none, to hold the Rainbow Wahine out of the NCAA Championships.
Hawai‘i would finally make that return in 1996, dropping just one set in the first four matches of the NCAA Tournament. But another long-time nemesis of the Rainbow Wahine, Stanford, stopped UH’s bid for a national title, sweeping Hawai‘i in the championship match. The Rainbow Wahine experienced another great run of success that started with the 1998 season, as transfer Heather Bown led the team from a perennial Top 25 squad and NCAA Tournament team to again a national-title contender.
Hawai‘i made its way to the NCAA Regional Final in 1998 and was one of the top seeds in the 1999 tournament before a scrappy Texas A&M team beat UH in the regionals.
Following that season, Kim Willoughby came to the program, joining Lily Kahumoku to form a dynamic duo that would lead the team to great success for another four years. From 2000-03, the Rainbow Wahine advanced to the NCAA Championship national semifinal match three times, while Shoji’s 2003 senior class became the winningest class in school history.
The Rainbow Wahine returned to the NCAA Championships in 2009, reaching the national semifinal match in Shoji’s 35th season, giving the legendary coach his second national coach of the year award and his 10th award for conference and region coach of the year.
Under Shoji, UH volleyball finished in the Top 10 in 23 of the 28 final AVCA polls, and ranked in the top five 15 times. They have made it to the postseason in all but one year, finishing with a winning record in all 39 seasons and missing the postseason just once.
The 69-year-old was also responsible for the start of the men’s volleyball program in 1978. Shoji served as the men’s coach at UH from 1978-85, compiling a record of 81-48 and leading the team to a Western Collegiate Volleyball Conference title in 1980.
Shoji was a three-sport athlete at Upland High School in California, playing football, basketball and baseball. He then moved on to UC Santa Barbara, where he played baseball for a year, along with three years of volleyball. He earned All-America honors as a volleyball player in 1968 and ’69. He earned his bachelor’s degree in physical education in 1969.
After spending two years in the U.S. Army, Shoji returned to Hawai‘i to coach the Kalani High School girl’s and boy’s volleyball teams. He then took an assistant coaching job at Punahou School.
Shoji and his wife, the former Mary Tennefos, reside in Manoa. The Shoji’s have three children, Cobey, Kawika and Erik. Daughter Cobey played volleyball at both UNLV and Michigan as a defensive specialist/setter. She graduated from Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in sports management and communications and later received her master’s in athletic administration from North Carolina. She is married to South Carolina assistant coach Coleman Hutzler who is in charge of special teams and linebackers. The Hutzlers have two children. Both sons Kawika and Erik helped lead the Stanford men’s volleyball team to a national title in 2010, with Kawika earning National Player of the Year honors. Currently the Shoji brothers are on the US National men’s volleyball team which will compete in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
