New plan saves state tournaments

By Wes Nakama
Advertiser Staff Writer

All eight spring high school state championship events were saved yesterday after Superintendent of Schools Paul LeMahieu approved a plan that will allow the tournaments to be held without students missing any class time.

Also under the plan, which was assembled by several prominent athletic officials, respective leagues will be able to complete their regular seasons in full and no tournament games will have to be played on a Sunday.

The tournaments also will not interfere with any graduation ceremonies.

LeMahieu announced the decision following a meeting with sports officials, who devised the plan, at his Department of Education office.

In a surprise announcement Tuesday, LeMahieu had declared all spring state tournaments canceled out of concern for missed class time caused by the recent 20-day teachers strike.

However, after encountering much public opposition, LeMahieu agreed to reconsider and allowed the officials to present a plan for the tournaments to be saved, provided no further class time would be missed.

"They've done an incredible job," LeMahieu said. "They had to deal not only with issues of logistics, which was a nightmare in itself, but also with issues of competition, fairness and safety for the athletes. They came up with a very clear, positive solution."

The group meeting with LeMahieu yesterday included Hawai'i High School Athletic Association executive secretary Keith Amemiya, O'ahu Interscholastic Association executive director Dwight Toyama, State Sen. Bob Hogue and Board of Education member Winston Sakurai.

That group and others met in a downtown office at 10:30 a.m. to discuss three proposals — one each from the OIA, Amemiya and Hogue. After taking elements from all three proposals, the group came up with one plan which they presented to LeMahieu at 12:30 p.m.

"We had a quick celebratory pizza lunch at 11:45, then came over here (to the Queen Lili'uokalani Building)," Amemiya said. "It was a huge challenge, and everyone made sacrifices."

Amemiya said the approved plan most resembles the one presented by the OIA. It features scaled-down tournaments (from 12 teams to eight) for baseball and girls basketball, and semifinals and finals being played on the same day in baseball.

In two of the more creative moves, the boys and girls tennis tournaments will be held on Kaua'i for the preliminary rounds May 18-19, with the semifinals and finals scheduled for May 21 on O'ahu. The girls basketball championship game will also be played May 21, a Monday.

LeMahieu and Amemiya acknowledged that the tournaments are "drastically different" from the original schedules, but modifications were necessary because of the short window of time left in the school year.

"People will be inconvenienced," LeMahieu said. "But the key phrase in all of this is, 'under the circumstances.' These are very unusual circumstances we have to deal with."

Dates for the championships, which will be decided in six tournaments, have been set. But some sites and times have not.

Toyama and OIA athletic directors are revising the league's regular season baseball and basketball schedules in a way that all games will be salvaged. Toyama had earlier stressed the OIA's desire to complete the regular seasons, even at the possible expense of state tournament participation.

LeMahieu said the league's athletic directors had to bend over backward to make that goal possible in baseball and girls basketball while also preserving the state tournaments for those sports.

"That was no easy chore," LeMahieu said. "They upped the ante, but they've been meeting over the last two days and worked very hard. League play will happen, although it will be greatly compacted."

Officials also were able to work state tournament schedules around Sundays, which they wanted to leave open as a rest day out of respect for family and religious concerns. Another obstacle was graduation ceremonies, some of which are scheduled for the weekend of May 25-26.

The officials had to finalize this plan in less than 36 hours.

"We were all under extreme pressure," Amemiya said. "It was very difficult, we had to be creative. There were a lot of meetings, a lot of phone calls.

"But everyone's willingness to sacrifice something made it possible. We knew we had to make it work, and that's why it worked out."