MPI's Dunn Muramaru lauded for 5-decade career in Hawaii high school baseball – Spectrum News

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HONOLULU — Dunn Muramaru got it right the third time.
With diamond dignitaries on either side of him on the dais at the American Baseball Coaches Association, the Mid-Pacific Institute baseball coach stood up and guided the crowd of about 10,000 at Washington, D.C.’s Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in a banzai toast.
At two prior functions at which he was a guest of honor — the National High School Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame banquet in Fort Myers, Fla., in early December, and a celebration at the Japanese Chamber of Commerce in Hawaii about a week later — it didn’t occur to him to do the traditional raising of the glasses.
But when it came time for his induction into the prestigious hall of the ABCA, joining the likes of former University of Hawaii skipper Les Murakami, it felt right. Even with his left foot in a boot from ankle replacement surgery.
“I finally figured it out,” Muramaru told Spectrum News in an interview earlier this year. “By the third time, I kind of had it down. … I’m probably known (there) as the coach that has the boot on and does banzais.”
On Sunday night, 12 Hawaii high school seniors will be formally inducted into the HHSAA Hall of Honor as the 2025 class, a culmination of years of effort in one or more sports. For the 70-year-old local legend known universally as “Coach Dunn,” the recognition on Jan. 3 was a moment nearly a half-century in the making.
He recounted the surreal feeling as he was seated on the table of honor next to Jim Schlossnagle, who went on to become the SEC Coach of the Year in his first season with Texas this spring. Muramaru was one of three high school coaches inducted among the eight. They each had their larger-than-life likeness displayed on a wall.
“All the guys like, ‘Oh, I heard of him. I heard of him,’ you know, it’s like, wow,” Muramaru said. “And I’m part of those guys?”
It was an on-brand, self-depracating reaction from someone who championed team over self since the 1970s. His pupils, often overmatched player-to-player in terms of sheer athleticism in the incredibly competitive Interscholastic League of Honolulu, have built a legacy of surmounting the odds as a collective group.
Of his 48-year longevity, Muramaru chuckled and said, “You do something long enough, eventually you figure it out, you know what I mean?”
Muramaru has led the Owls to five state championships (1990, 1991, 1992, 2002, 2013) in three different decades, plus six runner-up finishes.
In state annals, only Punahou’s record of seven straight titles from 2004 to 2010 and Iolani’s run of three from 1996 to 1998 have equaled MPI’s then-record three-peat in the early 1990s.
His former pupils include one current major leaguer in his former shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa, now a utility player for the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Damien coach Skyler Tengan, who just led the Monarchs to a third Division II state championship in the last four years, is a proud disciple. He was an Owls teammate of Kiner-Falefa and has made peace with the fact that he was displaced at shortstop by a future big-leaguer.
Tengan has tried to replicate the harder-than-it-sounds Muramaru fundamental philosophy: throw strikes on defense and pick your spots to hit and bunt when necessary to manufacture runs on offense.
It’s a style that tends to keep the Owls in any given game.
“Personally, I don’t understand or can comprehend how he did it for this long,” Tengan said, “because this is my fifth year, and I’m kind of exhausted. “I think it’s just the way he goes about it; he’s established something so unique.”
It requires a lot — a lot — of practice. Year-round weightlifting and workouts are ingrained in the MPI culture and passed down from one class to the next.
“It just runs itself at this point, because everyone knows what’s what you expect when you go and play baseball over there,” Tengan said. “He’s always going to preach hard work over talent, and … that’s always why he’s going to be successful forever, because just how hard they work and what amount of time and effort he’s willing to put into that program.”
Muramaru’s respect from his peers is universal.
“He deserves to be in there,” Kamehameha coach Daryl Kitagawa said of Muramaru’s dual hall of fame (ABCA and NHSBCA) inductions. “He’s also an awesome person from my dealings with him. He’s a great coach, and have the utmost respect for Coach Dunn and their program. When I first got the job, my goal was to try and be in the states every year (like them).”
Muramaru said former University of Hawaii assistant coach Coop DeRenne was responsible for calling people up and recommending him for induction.
His youth baseball inspirations were many, including Pop Eldredge, for whom he played in Manoa. He grew up listening to Hawaii Islanders games, remembering with clarity waking up one morning to discover the Islanders’ eight-run lead on the Tacoma Giants in the ninth inning the night before had disappeared in an 11-8 loss. It was a lesson in taking nothing for granted.
The 1971 Roosevelt graduate got his start at Kalani High five years later as a 21-year-old junior varsity coach.
“That was the worst year of my life, because you so young and you don’t know anything,” Muramaru said. “You think you know. Like all these kids, they think they know everything. I guess I was like that.”
But by the next year, he’d assumed the head varsity job and held that post until 1985, when he accepted a math teaching job at MPI. Once again, he coached JV baseball for a single year, then took over the varsity in 1987.
Piecing a title team together in those early years, he said, was “not even in my wildest dreams.
“That’s why, the night that we won the whole thing, that was something else,” he added of the 1990 breakthrough over Waianae, a 16-3 runaway.
In recent years, he has grudgingly embraced new technology, such as tracking for velocity and spin rates for pitchers and exit velocity for hitters.
The Muramaru work ethic remains timeless.
Hawaii Pacific University head coach Dane Fujinaka, an MPI alumnus who has raised the Sharks into contention in the PacWest, recalled shaking his head as he drove past his alma mater’s Manoa campus in the predawn hours to prepare for a team practice and did a double take when he saw his old coach lining Damon Field with the help of a lamp at 4:30 a.m.
Fujinaka, a former Owls catcher, was allowed to call his own games — something he looks back on with thanks as a key cog in his own coaching journey. That, and the do-it-yourself philosophy of field maintenance.
“His whole thing was, you got to try to do everything you can to win, and being Mid-Pac, we don’t have the football players that are playing baseball — we’re all small, undersized, and we all had to play smarter and work harder,” said Fujinaka, who attended Muramaru’s ceremony in Washington, D.C., as well as his local celebration in mid-December. “And that’s kind of just the mentality that he drove into us that I’m super grateful for because I think without that I’m not the player that I was, I’m not the coach that I am today.”
Mid-Pacific last made the state tournament in 2018, but there’s rarely been a year that the Owls did not factor into the incredibly competitive ILH playoff race. The Owls finished in fourth place (7-10) in the ILH this year, just outside of state qualification after falling to eventual state champ Saint Louis in the league tournament.
Muramaru has won state coach of the year honors five times, including in 2024, when he kept his team relevant despite losing 12 of his players before the season. They were expelled because of a social media video that included offensive content.
Muramaru retired from teaching in 2017 but can’t give up the game. That’s even through ankle surgeries in May and August of 2024; he credited his assistant coaches Craig Hayashi, Scott Muramoto and Brad Taura for holding the program together through his grueling rehab process that included an infection setback.
“You don’t really count,” he said of the years on his ledger. “When are you going to retire? I don’t know. I don’t want to retire. I mean, when I can’t do it anymore, maybe.”
Brian McInnis covers the state’s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii. He can be reached at brian.mcinnis@charter.com.

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