Only 3 football state berths remain to be settled

Pathetic. OIA gets a team that is just above .500 into the state tournament. Let along the other team playing for third place won only two games. Format is flawed. What are we even teaching these kids. We can be losers and still get into playoffs. Smh you might as well start handing participation trophies.

Ooooh, check out the video at the bottom of the story. It looks to me like the Damien QB got the football across the line before the fumble. Remember, once the front of the football crosses the front of the end zone, it is a touchdown.

A couple of things to notice in the beginning part of the video. 1. Look how close the ball is placed to the front of the end zone before the play. When the play starts, the Damien QB clearly jumps forward with the ball stretched out and I’m willing to bet the ball is across the end zone before it gets knocked away. It should be a TD! 2. The sideline ref who has the view of the play is distracted by some little kid right before the play. This ref probably wasn’t even paying attention to the ball crossing the plane of the end zone.

falcon future, agree with you. after the call, thought and was waiting for damien coach to question call.

I live in the state of Texas and the public schools.are.separate from the private. The advantage of private school is they recruit across the state or country. While public schools recruit within the community. This state bleeds football or sports in general, both boys and girls. Yes cheerleading is a sport too. My thought is, be happy that Hawaii lets both private and public compete. Yes it also awesome that the other islands can compete in the same area . So don’t hate what the association has done. Hey I would like to see one day, the Hawaii team challenge these Texas teams. We have Poly here too!!

BIG OG808 – I’m originally from the mainland as well and I just had that same conversation with someone yesterday. Most states, especially in the south, leave the private schools to their own classification or put them in one of the lower classification. This is done for 2 reasons: 1)To keep the private schools from poaching ALL of the public school kids. 2)Keeps parody, otherwise private schools would dominate like they do in Hawaii and west coast high schools. The other difference is there are no separate leagues that are their own governing bodies with their own rules. Everyone regardless if public or private plays under the state association who set all of the guidelines and rules. Once a season is done ALL of the schools get together for one state playoff. Not a league playoff THEN a state playoff. As long as the ILH and OIA are allowed to govern separately and have their own playoffs the system will be flawed. They need to all be ruled by the state association. Take the top 6-8 teams in each classification and have a real state playoffs regardless of league. You can put them in their own divisions similar to what the NFL does so the division winners are the automatically guaranteed a bye. then the 2nd or 3rd place teams make up the rest. But the way it is now it’s all about the OIA and ILH as leagues and not the state as a whole. It would nice to see adults put aside their egos and do what’s right for everyone especially the kids. At minimum it should be St. Louis vs Mililani and Punahou vs Kahuku in the state semi’s as the top 4 teams in the state. Yet we will see Kahuku play Campbell for a 3rd time for what? Let’s say Campbell beats Kahuku (it wont happen but what if), is Campbell a better team? NO but if you keep giving them chances against Kahuku they could get lucky. It’s all bad… cause if Campbell wins it was too many games… if Kahuku wins, Campbell had no business being there. lose lose either way…

@JustAFan
Same could be said about letting St. Louis and Punahou in. If they both make the final, then same scenario. That would be third maybe fourth time around.

Go ahead and do that and separate them. But the ILH has three teams in the top division what are they going to do. I believe the ILH needs to get all of the private schools in the same division. They all have the same pool of where kids can attend from. People were posting on here about mainland separating private and public. But those states have a lot more schools. In Hawaii this won’t work. I don’t think it would hurt the public schools as much, because there is a lot more public then private. They could still hold a public state tournament and it would still have a lot of schools to pull state wide. The state tournament for private would be much smaller.

The open only was created to benefit one league. If you believe otherwise, you’re a fool. They sold the pipe dream of better gates, more competitive games, national recognition.

Now the other divisions are good and competitive. But I bet those teams in division one could compete with open teams. But guess what? That’s exactly what we had before. It’s just they didn’t take the best teams from OIA and separate them to put them with top ILH. They wanted to try and get the OIA in on this World Series of football.haha.

Remember that anon. $3 million letter that was floating around maybe 4 years ago? Penned up by ILH backers. Offering the OIA $$$ for an “Elite League”? Well this is 2019, Open league,no money transfers. Huh? Well, who has taken the OPEN STATES the last 3 years with a great chance of 4? Right,bingo ILH. Now they negotiating for 2 ILH teams in? Good luck. Hey,OIA bigwigs, walk away. The OIA wins more STATES in the old format. Why? Because the ILH is a passing league. As Cal Lee said after the Kahuku/Tata lost, “we don’t play running teams, we’re at a lost”…..boom kanani, $3 mil. letter is born.

I agree the ILH schools should all be in the same division… it doesn’t make sense to separate them since they can all recruit the same. Do that then separate OIA and ILH completely.

I also agree that the top D1 schools could compete in the Open. Get rid of the open for the OIA. Take Moanalua, Leilahua, Kailua, and Waipahu… Put them with the Open teams again. that’s a 9 team D1 League. 8 League games. And 2 Out of League games at each schools discretion. I would love to see Hilo in that league too cause I think they could compete. I realize travel may be an issue though. Split the league in 2 divisions. Take the top 3 from each side for the state playoffs. The top 2 seeds get a bye. That’s 3 rounds of pretty good playoff football I bet.

I don’t really care what the ILH does but they could do something similar just with 6 schools. And just like different classifications have state champs… we get a public school state champion and a private school state champion. Who cares about being the champ overall if it’s not all even playing field anyway.

That is exactly what we had before except there were ten teams. So you going right back to the old formula. But Hilo was only coming over for states. State tournament had all the league champions and OIA fillers from the biggest league. Now ILH didn’t like this. They wanted to have two teams in. But how can you have two teams from a three team league get into the tournament. Now if all of the ILH was D1 then I would be all for it. Let their top two in and let’s go.