HONOLULU – Softball has been in existence at Chaminade University since 1988, making it the institution's third-oldest intercollegiate team sport behind men's basketball (1975) and women's volleyball (1984).
In the sport's first decade-and-a-half, partial records were kept in some years while in others, records were never maintained with whatever was already in existence eventually becoming lost through the passage of time.
In 2018, an ambitious project got underway to put together the history of Silverswords softball. Over the next several years and after numerous hours in pouring over newspaper clippings and online archives, the research on the history of the program was finally complete as much as possible in the fall of 2024 but was never publicized. Until now.
The new Chaminade softball record book is now online on the softball team's home page under the "History" menu at the page's header (or click
here for the record book). This is also the first time that a record book for softball has been made public to tell the history of the program.
"This was a very ambitious and tedious project that took dozens upon dozens of hours over the past seven years but it was well worth the time spent," said Chaminade Sports Information Director
Kevin Hashiro, who also put together the first record books for men's and women's soccer and women's basketball. He also pieced together the women's volleyball record book in 2021, the first for the program in over two decades.
The softball record book includes individual feats such as who is has the top career batting average (Rayna Strom-Okimoto's .416 average), who is the home run queen (Brandi Sasaki with 25) and, most recently, the career hits record of 194 set last year by
Taryn Fujioka.
(Note: the record book is hardly complete. There were some scores and even fewer statistics until the mid-2000s, thus the publicized history is whatever was available through research. If there are items that could be added, please contact Hashiro at kevin.hashiro@chaminade.edu and have documentation, such as newspaper articles and/or official NCAA paperwork, ready.)
