Hawaii High School News: Girls Basketball Moving Seasons in 2008-09!
UPDATE: All Varsity Levels will move in 2007-08 (JV and Intermediate seasons are still being decided).
The Hawaii High School Athletic Association executive board approved the realignment of the girls basketball season, among others, for the 2008-2009 school year. Currently, girls basketball is played during the spring in Hawaii while on the mainland and at the collegiate level their season is held during the winter. This fact has drawn criticism from local civil rights lawyer Jill Nunokawa who believes that female players here are missing out on college scholarship opportunites because they are “out of season.”
In 2008-09, Hawaii will realign some, but not all high school sports to follow the mainland calendar. Girls basketball will move from spring to winter, softball from winter to spring and boys volleyball from fall to spring. Boys and girls soccer, which is played during the fall at the collegiate level, will remain a winter sport.
Will this make things better or worse?… Let’s see.
Gym Space: Worse
Pros: None.
Cons: While this is an obvious problem for all schools, for the ILH, this is a nightmare. To offer more students the opportunity to participate, the ILH schools often field additional teams on the intermediate level and in some cases even add a second varsity. For a school like Iolani, they will need to figure out how to manage 10 teams, 5 each for girls and boys in Varsity I, Varsity II, JV, Intermediate I and Intermediate II. In the case of Punahou and Kamehameha, they face an even greater challenge with two teams at all levels including the JV.
The proposed solution to alleviate the scheduling problems was to move the JV to a different season, but that may also prove difficult because volleyball will be in the opposing seasons - girls in the fall and boys in the spring.
What do the ILH schools do?… Do they try and fit 12 teams into gyms that barely fit 6 or do they just eliminate the “extra” levels? Hmm…
Recruiting: Better
Pros: High school girls teams will now have the opportunity to participate in several pre-season tournaments that they once were not able to attend due to the misaligned seasons. These tournments provide players with the opportunity to be seen by college coaches as the make their recruiting stops around the country. This will also allow Hawaii teams the chance to compete against better mainland programs which will hopefully raise the level of play as it has done with the boys.
Cons: The question is… How many more scholarships will this realignment generate? Hopefully someone will keep track of this, because it’ll be interesting to see how much the number increases, if at all.
Coaching: Worse
Pros: Not sure this is a plus for the players, but many young inexperienced coaches will now have the opportunity to move into positions vacated by veterans who currently pull double duty with the boys and girls.
Cons: Coaches that help both boys and girls will now have to make a decision and once they choose, someone loses out. Take Kalaheo for example… though Chico Furtado is no longer the head coach of the girls, there was a long period of time when he pulled double duty as an assistant with the boys and head coach for the girls. The girls program benefited greatly as they placed several girls in Division I programs and grew to become one of the state’s top teams. 2007 OIA East White Division Coach of the Year Bob Morikuni is currently the head coach of both the boys and the girls programs at McKinley. This year, his experiences leading the boys team to the 2007 Division II State title has carried over to the girls who are in first in the OIA White Division.
Referees: Worse
Pros: Like coaches, the experienced refs were once inexperienced refs. Basically, they’ll work a lot of games in a very short time which hopefully means they’ll get better in the long run.
Cons: Let’s face it, there’s only a handful of “good” referees on the island, so the way things are now, the scheduling of crews can be manuevered to assign the better ones to the “big” games or split up to act as lead officials to mentor the less experienced. Now, with twice the amount of games during the winter season, the current pool of referees will be stretched incredibly thin leaving important games in the hands of those not quite capable.
Will this mean that Hawaii high school leagues will need to revert back to the two-person crews of old? That seems to be the solution in other place around the country, so maybe that will happen here.
Participation: Even
Pros: Multi-sport basketball players will now have the opportunity to compete in track and field. Two-sport stars of the past like Careena Onosai, Megan Burton and Erin Stovall would have been able to concentrate all their efforts on each sport separately without sacrificing one or the other.
Cons: Multi-sport soccer players will not be able to play basketball. For this season, here are a few players from just two schools who would not be able to compete in basketball and soccer: Chelsea Deptula (Punahou), Melanie Feldman (Punahou), Chelsea Unemori (Iolani)
Bottom Line: While it appears things will be “worse” when the realignment happens (and probably will be at first), that may not be the case 10 years down the line when things are all said and done. The question is… What’s the barometer for success?
Who knows… If you ask different people, you’ll get a different answer, but regardless… good or bad, better or worse, there will be a lot of headaches to come when the 2008-2009 school year rolls around. Get strapped in cause it’ll be a bumpy ride…
Posted in: High School, Recent News, Women
Big Daddy said,
April 27, 2007
How will the schools find gym space? Example: Iolani’s 10 volleyball teams competition for gym space was so bad that one team ended up practicing on the grass. What are the 10 basketball teams going to do? Practice on tennis courts or the parking lot? How about the schools with only 1 gym (or some with none)?
Legally, I guess the HHSAA didn’t want to incur legal fees, especially since Hawaii was the last state to change. But my understanding is that it was not a US Supreme Court decision, but one by the 6th Circuit, which does not govern Hawaii. While their decision that Michigan violated Title IX was based on federal law, we don’t know that the MHSAA’s arguments apply to our situation here.
The US Supreme Court has not ruled on this issue, and Hawaii could have been the one to take it all the way up, but in the end, it was easier to roll over than spend $$$ defending the status quo.
Coach Stew said,
May 26, 2007
This decision will make things worse for female athletes. Title IX was supposed to offer fair gender treatment and increase opportunities for female athletes and females in general. This decision serves a few and will have major implications on small ILH, Outer Island rural and private schools. For example HPA, Ka’u, Seabury, Iolani, Konawaena, Punahou, St. Anthony are just a few schools that have athletes playing both basketball and soccer. It is not just a matter of choice, most female students have chosen a path as young as 8-9 focusing on attempting to play both sports in High School. This major decision takes this away in one quick swoop. There is a major storm ahead still yet on the horizon as there will be more lawsuits that will follow. On the mainland, majority of the states play soccer in the fall because of weather. In Hawaii, they play soccer in winter because male football still rules in the fall and shared football fields are scarce. But the logical solution to all this would be to move girls soccer in the fall. Some one will challenge the courts on the same arguments that Minnesota case brought, but on from the soccer season viewpoint. Who is to say that a female soccer player in Hawaii files suit that argues that she is not given the same opportunities as male soccer players on the mainland are given because of different seasons. What about Hawaii male players arguing the same point? We may end up back to square one. In Hawaii, there are more female soccer players than female basketball players. The most popular combination seems to be basketball-soccer and not softball-soccer or volleyball-soccer. Also you are talking about boys basketball going head on and challenging girls basketball for fan and fan support. Will there be enough excitement to go to two back to back state tournaments or will they combine them and share a smaller HHSAA pie? Right now Hawaii girls basketball owns the spotlight because there are no major team sports but baseball. That could change. Girls basketball may have shot themselves in the foot becoming small sister to boys basketball, similar to the WNBA vs. NBA. What about the playoff nightmare? Who, where, when and how?? If you split girls and boys volleyball seasons won’t that create another can of title IX worms? When Patsy Mink wrote Title IX to offer more opportunities for women athletes I do not think she would have thought it would bite her own grandchildren in the okole and hurt more female keiki than it should have helped. This summer the HHSAA will have fun trying to solve this but in the end it will be the local league secretaries that will have the nightmare of figuring logistics and scheduling. I’m glad I don’t have that job. If I were them, I would get my sleep now…And to avoid a costly lawsuit move girls soccer to the fall ……