Next For Shoji: V-ball Hall Of Fame

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Friday - October 21, 2009

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By the time you read this, Dave Shoji will have won his 1,000th match as head coach of the Rainbow Wahine Volleyball team. The only coach to win more is UCLA’s Andy Banachowski. He also is tied for second with four national championships. His teams have led the nation in attendance since 1994. But Shoji is seemingly unaffected by the pending record and doesn’t expect to be emotionally overwrought come Wednesday.

“I’ve had a while to prepare for this, so I won’t be jumping up and down,” says Shoji. “I will be thinking about all the people who made this possible - the players, the coaches, trainers, support staff. It’s a shared achievement; it’s not just about me.” It’s hard to believe, but the AVCA has inducted six active coaches into its Hall of Fame, and Shoji is not one of them. “Well, there’s a process for nomination, and I was just nominated last year, and some others were selected. I’m OK with the coaches that are in,” says Shoji. “It will be nice when it happens.” Asked about who he’d like to hear from after the benchmark win is recorded, Shoji says “Family, of course. And I’d welcome a call from any of the former players.” Shoji will be one of the select few to get to this level because of limitations on matches - now 25 a year plus playoffs. To get to where Shoji is now you’d have to average 25 wins a year for 40 years! Shoji has averaged more than 29 victories per year since taking the job in 1975.

It is always sad when a player suffers a serious injury, but when senior QB Greg Alexander suffered a knee injury against Louisiana Tech it represented the end of his career. Alexander was putting up monster numbers and led the nation in a couple of categories. Because it happened in the fourth game, no medical red shirt is possible. Typically, Alexander is not spending a lot of time feeling sorry for himself. He has had successful surgery that should take nine months to bring him back to good health. It’s not impossible that he could get into somebody’s NFL camp, but it probably wouldn’t happen till 2011.

With Alexander out, Bryan Moniz becomes the rarest sight on an FBS team: a walk-on starting quarterback. Not sure he’s the only one in the country, but it’s likely. Expect that his status will change next semester.

An amazing fact: Walk-ons are not allowed to eat at the training table, so after guiding the offense through practice, Moniz and other walk-ons have to either pay for breakfast to eat with their team-mates or fend for themselves. No wonder some people say that NCAA stands for No Clue At All.

We apparently won’t be looking at Rush Limbaugh in an NFL owners box anytime soon, except as a guest. St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts decided to drop Limbaugh from the owners group, looking to purchase the St. Louis Rams. Limbaugh had become “a complication and a distraction,” according to Checketts.

The conservative talk show host had alienated much of the black community with comments about Eagles quarterback Donovan McNab and saying the NFL too often resembled the “Crips and the Bloods, without the weapons.” Limbaugh’s remarks were unquestionably protected speech, but the NFL is equally within its rights to deny anyone entry into its exclusive owners club who it deems a negative influence.