Jerry Campany: The OIA has gained ground on the ILH in state team competition

Parity in high school sports has gone public.

When Punahou tied Destiny Look and a few other girls from Mid-Pacific at the Island Movers/ HHSAA State Track and Field Championships in the middle of May, it meant a little something more than history for the tiny Owls. It gave the Interscholastic League of Honolulu its 24th team title of the school year.

On its own, that isn’t a big deal. Oahu’s private school league has taken at least half the hardware in each of the last 10 years that the HHSAA has been open for business. In 2019 before the pandemic struck down prep sports for nearly two years, the ILH earned 35 koa heads for 78% of the haul. When the current crop of seniors were freshmen, the ILH took 62% of the team titles available.

So Oahu’s private schools still ruled. But what made this campaign different was that the OIA finally stepped up as equals. If Kahuku’s girls had managed 20 more points in the track meet and denied titles to Punahou and MPI, their league would have claimed 23 titles to the ILH’s 22.

As it was, the OIA celebrated 22 times this school year, 11 by boys teams, 10 by girls and one by Radford’s co-ed cheerleading crew. Its previous high was was 14 way back in 2015 and dropped way down to five in the year before COVID.

Punahou claimed 10 state titles this year, the 19th straight time leading the tally. But the Buffanblu had to work for it this time.

The OIA’s competitiveness wasn’t reflected in the recent Hall of Honor inductions, with only four athletes represented in the class of 12 to the ILH’s seven, but the sudden success is undeniable.

Eleven public school athletic directors on Oahu had to make room in the trophy case since last summer, but the biggest driver to the league’s resurgence came from Samuel Mills Damon’s old haunts.

Moanalua captured seven state team championships in the 2025-26 crusade, with the boys ruling in air riflery, boys volleyball and track and field. Na Menehune girls won cheerleading, Division I flag football, wrestling and judo. No previous OIA school had collected more than the five the Menes earned in 2022 and Moanalua is also the only one with four in one school year, doing it three times.

There were 45 state team titles up for grabs just four years ago. There were 53 opportunities this time.

Moanalua already has the most successful public school athletic director in Joel Kawachi, and he got a boost from Natalie Iwamoto and a year from Kahuku legend Reggie Torres. More importantly, Na Menehune boasted of probably the top individual athletes the school has produced since it opened in 1972.

With apologies to greats like Watson Tanuvasa, Tyger Taam, Jodi Benson, Caylene Valdez, Stephany Lee and Austin Matautia, this year’s standouts would rival any school’s.

James Millare spent his autumns repeating as state cross country champion, the first to do so since Kamehameha’s Kaeo Kruse in 2015. In the last two springs, he collected seven gold medals in track and field with a sweep of every distance above 800 meters two years in a row and helping his 4×800 crew to another win to lead Na Menehune to the team title.

In addition to three state wrestling titles, Zaira Sugui went from being the state’s top quarterback in flag football as a junior to the best defensive player on a state championship team as a senior. As if the end of her senior season wasn’t enough, she went out for judo for the first time and reached a state final two days before the flag football state tournament.

The history of Hawaii prep sports have always had an undercurrent of private schools’ advantages over the poor publics, coming to a head when Farrington, Kaimuki, McKinley, Roosevelt and Kalani defected the ILH for the OIA and continuing through Cal Lee’s Prep Bowl dynasty at Saint Louis to the advent of the Open Division.

With transfer rules nonexistent in all sports, a lot of those advantages that have existed since the ILH came to be more than a century ago and the Rural OIA was born just before World War II have been wiped out. In some ways, the public schools have the edge now.

Sure, it’s a crazy world where college quarterbacks take a pay cut to join the NFL and it won’t be long before prep stars will have to forfeit an NIL paycheck for an opportunity to earn a degree, but for right now it seems perfectly balanced.

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Reach Jerry Campany at [email protected].