Damuni Ohana
Move to Utah ‘a blessing’
It was five years ago that Jack Damuni made the phone call that would change his life and the lives of his family.
It was supposed to be a quick congratulatory call to newly hired Brigham Young University football coach Kalani Sitake, a former BYU teammate of Damuni.
“We were talking and he asked me, ‘Hey, I’ve got a position over here for player personnel that’s opening. I don’t know if you’re interested,’ ” Damuni recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Come on down.’ I’m, like, ‘Shoots, let’s go.’ ”
The one thing that could have pulled Damuni and family away from their longtime home on Maui had happened — he was named director of player personnel then. Now, Damuni’s official title is Executive Coordinator of On-campus Recruiting and Community/Player Relations.
“That’s the only reason I would move back to Provo, Utah, from Maui,” Damuni said via phone Wednesday. “I would never leave Maui if it wasn’t for that job. It was a blessing in disguise for me and my family.
“They’ve been here ever since and it’s been like living a dream ever since. Every single day I get up and go to work and I still feel like I’ve got to pinch myself. I can’t believe I’m here.”
Son Raider Damuni, then in the seventh grade at Kamehameha Schools Maui, has gone on to become a four-star safety who signed with BYU over a final list that also included Utah, Stanford, Oregon and Oregon State.
The family feeling under Sitake was the final piece of the puzzle to choose BYU for Raider.
“Coach Kalani is such a great coach, it’s more than football with him,” he said. “He treats all the players like family. Another huge reason for BYU was just the fact that I live two minutes from the school. One of my best friends (Logan Fano) committed to play over there, and my first cousin (Jovesa Damuni), too. We all talked and this is the move we wanted to make.”
Raider Damuni graduated from Timpview High School in January and is set to leave on his two-year LDS mission to the California Bay Area on March 31.
“When I moved up here, it might have seemed difficult,” he said.
“Looking at it now, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it was going to be. I really actually like it up here. It wasn’t much of an adjustment, especially because it’s such a huge Polynesian community up here, with a bunch of people from Hawaii. So, that made it easier.”
Silina Damuni, an 11-year-old Kamehameha student when the family left Maui, has developed into a two-time all-state volleyball setter as a current sophomore.
“I just remember the family dinners we would have every Sunday and I remember all my friends and playing sports — I played for Manuia Soccer Club and Lanakila Volleyball (Club),” she said of her memories. “And my home in Kula. I would consider myself from Maui.”
Family is clearly important to all of the Damunis. So is competition.
“We talk about who’s better in pickleball,” Silina said of her discussions with her closest sibling, Raider. “It’s definitely me.”
Older siblings Dayson and Selai Damuni both attended Kamehameha Maui before moving with the family.
Mom Shalei Damuni met Jack at BYU when both were students and they married soon after.
They moved to Maui in 1996 — Jack became a substitute teacher here, also worked for Old Lahaina Luau and coached football at Baldwin High School.
Shalei Damuni — nee Shalei Mossman — was a teacher at Kamehameha Maui and is now a teacher in Provo.
Jack Damuni originally met Sitake when both were youngsters in Laie on the North Shore of Oahu. Their paths crossed again at BYU when Damuni was a senior on the BYU football team and Sitake came in as a freshman.
That turned out to be an important relationship more than 20 years later.
“I took him under my wing, we hung out, so part of him offering me the job is because he asked me, ‘Man, I remember when you were here and you used to take care of me. I want you to come down and take care of the players the same way you used to take care of us when we were going to college,’ ” Damuni said of that fateful phone call with Sitake. “So, I was, like, ‘Yeah, shoots, no problem.’ ”
The Damunis still have Maui on their minds.
“I was there 21 years, we miss Maui a lot,” Jack Damuni said. “We still talk about it every single day. There’s not a day goes by that we don’t mention something about Maui. My oldest son was born in Utah, but my other three kids were born on Maui.”
Selai Damuni played volleyball at Kamehameha Maui through her junior year and then moved with the family to Provo and starred at Timpview. She earned a scholarship to Western New Mexico University and played there for three seasons before the COVID-19 pandemic spurred her decision to finish her degree at Utah Valley University, living with family.
Dayson Damuni played basketball at Kamehameha Maui — he is set to graduate from BYU soon and attend pilot school.
Raider Damuni played in three state championship games for Timpview — two in football and one in basketball — though those teams all came out on the losing end. The 6-foot-2, 190-pound standout played against former Lahainaluna standout Devon Sa-Chisolm in the 2020 Utah 5A state championship game. Damuni was named the 5A Defensive MVP and Region 7 MVP.
He was playing basketball the first time Sitake ever saw him. It led to the coach calling the then-eighth grader into his office and offering him a scholarship on the spot. Raider had several offers from Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big 12 programs, but in the end BYU won out.
“Coach Kalani sees him playing basketball and he calls me and said, ‘I saw this kid playing basketball and his name was Raider,’ ” Jack Damuni said. “‘He’s unbelievable, I want to offer him a scholarship.’ He didn’t know that was my son. I told him that was my son and he said, ‘Holy cow, bring him into my office’ and offered him the scholarship.
“We had just moved from Maui. That was unbelievable for us, blessing for him, too.”
Raider Damuni wishes more folks could see the talent on Maui.
“There’s no doubt that the top players on Maui can come up here and make a name for themselves, play Division I,” he said. “I know a lot of the people that I played Big Boys or Pop Warner with — I know a lot of them, if they had the kind of exposure that’s up here on the Mainland, there’s no doubt that they’d be up here playing at Division I colleges.” ■ Robert Collias is at rcollias @mauinews.com