Shane Dudoit holds up the trophy after he guided the Baldwin High School baseball team to the Division I state championship on May 11, 2018. Dudoit is taking over the baseball program at Kamehameha Maui. ANDREW LEE photo
Shane Dudoit, who led Baldwin High School to the Division I state baseball championship in 2018 and a semifinal appearance a year later, has been hired as the new head coach at Kamehameha Schools Maui.
Dudoit, a scout in the Texas Rangers organization, and KSM associate athletic director Kaholo Rickard confirmed the hire to The Maui News on Wednesday evening.
“I am very, very excited for this opportunity,” Dudoit said via phone from Easley, S.C., on Wednesday. “I did not see myself in this position after the COVID and after being let go for no reason in 2019. It still hurt, throughout COVID it hurt.”
Dudoit has been a stalwart of the baseball scene on Maui for decades and has also been a successful head coach at St. Anthony that included an appearance in the 2008 Division II state final.
At Kamehameha Maui, Dudoit takes over for Mo Lau Hee, who stepped away after the 2022 season.
“I missed the kids, I missed the challenge,” Dudoit said. “Watching the (Maui Interscholastic League) season this year and watching (coach) Craig (Okita) and the Baldwin team get to the (state) finals — you know, I missed that. Even at that point though, I didn’t think we’d be where we are today.
“The opportunity came up, I applied online through Oahu and it worked out.”
Dudoit was also a longtime assistant coach under current KSM athletic director Jon Viela at Baldwin — Viela and Dudoit guided the Bears to the 2016 state crown.
Viela then moved to Kamehameha Maui as AD and Dudoit became the Baldwin head coach from 2017-19. Dudoit spent last summer as an assistant coach for the Alaska Goldpanners summer collegiate team.
“My intermediate supervisor is Kaholo Rickard and, you know, Kamehameha has certain layers of how things get done up there — it has to be done the right way,” Dudoit said. “There’s a lot of channels to go through when you want to get things done. It comes with the territory.”
Rickard, who coordinated the KSM baseball coaching search, said the school is happy to have Dudoit on board. Rickard was a standout baseball player himself, at Lahainaluna High School and the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
“We’re excited, I mean Shane has a track record that’s impressive,” Rickard said Wednesday evening. “He brings a lot of experience with coaching private at St. Anthony and then being at Baldwin. And then his experiences outside of that. The body of work he’s produced, I’m very impressed with that and I can appreciate it as a baseball player.”
Rickard said that the search was thorough and that Dudoit was the man who emerged from the field of candidates.
“With the search for a baseball coach I really wanted to look for somebody who could bring our boys together and play together,” Rickard said. “I think that for me, Shane is somebody who can do that. And he’s done it consistently at different places throughout his career, so that was important to me.”
Dudoit and Viela are close friends. Viela was a standout player at UH Manoa from 1989-92.
“Having Jon there every day, I think we believe in the same things of baseball — I mean, we’ve been talking about baseball for the last 20 years,” Dudoit said. “I don’t think anything is going to change. We’ll be doing the same thing we did 20 years ago, it’s a fun game.
“The game has been good to him, as well as being great for me as well. Like I say, I really do miss it.”
* Robert Collias is at .
- Shane Dudoit holds up the trophy after he guided the Baldwin High School baseball team to the Division I state championship on May 11, 2018. Dudoit is taking over the baseball program at Kamehameha Maui. ANDREW LEE photo
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