The coach: Don't make kids strike victims again
Advertiser Staff
"Chico" Furtado is best known as coach of the Kalaheo High School girls basketball team that has not lost a league game in more than four years.
On the court he is a scowling taskmaster, baiting referees, one moment coaxing and the next coercing his players in a voice that reverberates through crowded gymnasiums.
Thomas Furtado is the main student counselor at Maryknoll High School, not widely known except to the dozens of students who seek his advice and help confirming the direction of their lives. He speaks quietly and calmly and impresses his peers with his insightful analysis of situations.
Thomas Furtado and Chico Furtado are the same man, and whether he is softly reassuring a worried student or loudly admonishing an error-prone basketball player, no one who knows him doubts that he cares very much about the students and student-athletes in his care.
Furtado was so upset about the prospect of the state basketball tournament being canceled that he could not go to work.
"Co-curricular activities are as important for a lot of kids as classes are," he said. "Basketball and the state tournament are as important to Brandy (Richardson, Kalaheo's two-time state Player of the Year) as a science fair is to a dedicated science student.
"Basketball is going to pay for Brandy's college education. She'll tell you that if not for basketball she wouldn't have even finished high school.
"Adults' inability to resolve problems might deny these student-athletes an event they have cherished and worked hard for all their lives; and make them victims again.
"Don't make kids victims of something they have nothing to do with (the strike) . . .
"If he (Schools Superintendent Paul LeMahieu) says no kid can miss more than one day of class (instead of no class at all), it gives us so much more leeway to work with — a chance to come up with a quality state tournament.
"If they come up with some boiled-down, four-team thing just to have it — don't do it.
"I tell my kids all the time, 'If you are just going to go through the motions, go home.' "
