Girl soccer athletes
By Jill Nunokawa
get kicked around
by HHSAAMANY people are outraged by the decision of the Hawaii High School Athletic Association (HHSAA) to move the Feb. 18-21 Girls' State Soccer Tournament from Aloha Stadium on Oahu to War Memorial Stadium on Maui, in order to accommodate the Mariah Carey concert. Welcome to another fight for gender equity in athletics!
The irony of this latest assault on female athletes is that the justification for moving the soccer tournament is to satisfy gender equity concerns. Yet, for the last four years, the HHSAA has never seriously addressed the issue of gender equity at all.
Granted, the performance of a superstar the caliber of Mariah Carey may be a once-in-a-lifetime event. It may warrant the use of Aloha Stadium to accommodate the large crowd. But the HHSAA executive board and former executive secretary Dwight Toyama could have easily worked out a win-win situation here.
Since the soccer tournament was pre-scheduled for the desired date of the concert, promoter Tom Moffatt donated $25,000 to the HHSAA.
Toyama and the athletic directors are in a dispute over when they actually received notice about this. Yet Toyama knew about it at least back in October 1997, and could have asked for input from players, coaches, parents, athletic directors and proponents of gender equity, like the Gender Equity Sports Club, which was formed to promote gender equity in Hawaii high school athletics.
If he had, Toyama would have discovered that the vast majority of them would have wanted the tourney to be played on Oahu because:
1) The population of Hawaii is centered on Oahu. Attendance numbers would be higher there and thus more revenue could be collected.
2) The media coverage is on Oahu. The players would receive better press exposure, which helps in increasing college scholarship opportunities.
3) While there is no facility in Hawaii comparable to Aloha Stadium, other considerations could be UH's Cooke Field, the Ala Wai ( where the UH Wahine soccer team plays) or four high school facilities (Mililani, Pearl City, Moanalua and Kaiser), which have all-grass fields large enough to host a tournament.
It is hypocritical for Toyama and the HHSAA to argue that they must move the tournament to Maui to comply with gender equity. The costs will be too high, not to mention the terrible hardship on parents and players.
Initially, Toyama and the HHSAA were too arrogant to care and, in fact, voted to keep the entire $25,000 within the HHSAA budget. The girls were not going to get any of the money that Moffatt assumed would be used to pay for players' air fare, hotel rooms and other costs.
Only when parents and coaches complained did the HHSAA board reverse its decision and agree to allocate $10,000 to the girls to help defray costs.
There is still time to change this injustice. Call the members of the HHSAA executive board, especially its new president, Anthony Ramos, and urge them to reverse their decision.
Tell them to allow the Girls' State Soccer Tournament to remain on Oahu and that the $10,000 should be given to neighbor island teams to subsidize their costs for bringing their players over to Oahu.
Remind the HHSAA to play fair.
How to call:
Members of the Hawaii High School Athletic Association's Executive Board:
Anthony Ramos, 842-8350
Jill Nunokawa is staff attorney for the
University of Hawaii at Manoa's Student Equity, Excellence & Diversity
program and president of the Sports Gender Equity Club.