Cole Ewalt, standout junior midfielder for the Bard Raptors' men's soccer team, laughed when asked if Bard was the most popular school in the state of Hawaii when he was choosing his college destination.

"No," Ewalt said with a laugh. "By no means."

But Ewalt is part of a growing contingent that has already changed the way the Aloha State thinks of Bard Athletics. He, along with senior star volleyball outside hitter Ryan Lum and other recent team members, including Rylee Barber on women's soccer and Coe Trevorrow on men's soccer, have come together to form a pipeline of talent from Hawaii to Bard.

In the process, they've found a Bard family that's allowed them to excel on the courts and fields of Annandale-on-Hudson, while showing the Bard community just what it means to be from Hawaii as well.

"Bard really fosters an environment where people do feel comfortable coming from a long ways away," Lum's coach, Lindsey Veersma, said. "Having a family away from home as well is something that I think a lot of those kids rely on. It's a similar experience to things that Ryan has even told me about being on the island. It's a very close-knit group there. And we've fostered the same kind of close-knit group here."

Building a network of like-minded individuals looking to succeed came in a number of different ways. For Lum, it was seeing her older sister, Nikki, succeed at playing volleyball while attending the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. So when then-head coach of women's volleyball (and now Associate Athletic Director) Stefanie Carrington reached out to recruit her to come play at Bard, the trek 4,942 miles long — from Honolulu to Annandale-on-Hudson — felt manageable, even exciting.

"I came to visit Bard and I just saw the beautiful campus," Lum said. "I came here for the very high academics, but also I was able to pursue volleyball in a very competitive league, which is the Liberty League. It really checked the most boxes for me."

Lum is a Chemistry major, on a pre-med track, with Bard's remarkably tailored academic attention allowing her to create her own major, as so many do here. And she's taken on a leadership role on the volleyball team, mirroring the work she did as captain for four years of her high school's volleyball team as well. She began playing at the age of six, starting the same time her older sisters did, but at a younger age. 

"I knew that that was something I wanted to do here was be a leader," Lum said. "It's all really just natural to me. I think being a leader is a very privileged experience that I get to do and I know that not many people get to do it. So I don't I definitely don't take it for granted."

Ewalt, too, doesn't take much for granted, including every day he gets to play soccer. It was that enthusiasm that made him stand out to his current coach, Bard's TJ Kostecky.

"I met him first in New York City at a recruiting showcase," Kostecky recalled. "At Randall's Island. It was a cold, rainy, freezing cold day. I remember I opened up the group that I was coaching, I said, 'How's everybody doing today?' And the weather was awful, right? It was really awful. And Cole says, 'I'm doing great. And I said, 'I love that. I'm doing great as well.' I remember looking at him like, are you doing great? And I said, 'Where are you from?' He goes, 'Hawaii.' He's from Hawaii, and it's raining, it's cold, and he's doing great. So the first impression was really positive and powerful."

Ewalt remembers truly feeling great, though he did regret one choice: "I told myself, you know, I'm from Hawaii, but I'm not going to show these guys that I'm bothered by the rain. So I didn't actually wear any long sleeves or anything. Terrible mistake. It was raining. I was freezing. I couldn't feel my feet after the day, but you know, it ended up working out pretty well."

Ewalt, too, visited the Bard campus and fell in love with the place. Even when his freshman season ended in his very first game due to a wrist injury, he found his Bard family, attending practice, helping wherever he could, while beginning an academic career and activities on campus that have made him a leader, both of the soccer team and places like BardEATS, the sustainable food initiative on campus.

"That was a very hard time for me," Ewalt said. "But I will say that what we've built as a soccer team and the community that we are fostering genuinely helped me through that time."

Ewalt is an Environmental and Urban Studies major, and his focus, as he zeroes in on the senior project every Bard student completes, is about the systems we live in. Simplifying and changing the way we live is central to what brought him to Bard, he said, along with a sense that while Hawaii offers brilliant weather, surfing year round, "I didn't want that to be my story.  My mentality was, and still is, I want to go make that career for myself. I didn't want to be literally confined to an island in the middle of an ocean. I want to be able to have the freedom, the ability to work for a future that I can make for myself."

Despite leaving Hawaii, both Lum and Ewalt hold their home state close to their hearts. When the wildfires hit Maui, Cole and his brother Rowen were back home, and his mother, Regina Mangieri, told him the Red Cross was looking for volunteers. At 7 AM the next morning, Cole and Rowen had driven down to the state convention center, ready to pitch in.

For Ryan, who was here on campus already, the way her Bard family connected to her Hawaiian roots came from the way Veersma approached her.

"Lindsey reached out to me and said, 'Hey, do you have any resources that you can send me?' So there were like documents going around with direct links on ways to support the families that were directly impacted by the fires. I really appreciate her doing that, because she could have easily gone online and found some random resources that people have been advertising but she instead reached out to me directly."

Veersma and Kostecky said they've both learned from Ewalt and Lum, too, in a very Hawaiian way. Kostecky highlighted Ewalt's mindfulness as something he's seen when he has visited the state himself.

And Veersma, in addition to shouting out the chocolate macadamia nuts Lum introduced her to, has worked to incorporate "Ohana", Hawaiian for the bond among a family, into the volleyball team, too.

"I can see that with Ryan's family," Veersma said. "She's really close with her sisters. And overall she has a really strong family unit. That's really important to her. And that's something that I want to make sure we're fostering that as well."

Lum and Ewalt both said they feel that here at Bard. And they want to make sure they aren't the only ones.

As Ewalt put it: "The thing I always tell people is now that guys know me, you know everyone in Hawaii."