Girls’ tourney cut,
sparking new protest
The HHSAA says no
to wrestling matches that
ADs approved last year
By Pat Bigold
Star-BulletinA decision by the Hawaii High School Athletic Association that affects female athletes is once again drawing protests from students, parents and coaches. A pilot state girls' wrestling tournament approved last year by athletic directors was axed by the HHSAA's executive board on Monday.
The girls' tournament was to have been concurrent with the boys' tournament at the Stan Sheriff Center in three weeks -- Feb. 27-28.
HHSAA's executive director, Henry Kibota, confirmed last night that the event, which was approved at a state gathering of athletic directors last May, will not be held. Kibota said HHSAA bylaws require a sport to have three participating leagues before a state tournament can be held.
The rejection of the wrestling tournament follows the association's unpopular decision, reversed this week, to move the girls' soccer tournament to Maui from Oahu.
The Oahu Interscholastic Association has the largest participation of female wrestlers and is the only league that conducts a championship meet separate from the boys. But there are varying degrees of female participation in the Interscholastic League of Honolulu (Oahu), the Maui Interscholastic League and the Big Island Interscholastic Federation.
Bob Frey, who has coached boys' wrestling at Radford High for 35 years, said he was delighted when he learned that a girls' state tournament had been approved. "We thought it was a done deal when the ADs voted for it."
Frey said he had spoken of it with all the other coaches in the OIA as well as a few in the ILH. "They all thought it was a done deal, too, and I even put it in my schedule."
HHSAA bylaws allow the executive board to overturn any recommendation voted by athletic directors at their annual meeting. That rarely happens.
When the board does reject a recommendation, it normally does so within weeks of the athletic directors' meeting, and athletic directors are notified.
A summer meeting of the executive board tabled the recommendation.
Frey and parents such as Sid Remiticado, whose 16-year-old daughter, Jill, an Iolani student, won a national wrestling championship on the mainland last summer, are angry that the HHSAA waited until this week to act.
"They got promised something and the HHSAA didn't deliver," said Remiticado, who lives in Aiea. "Most of the girls who came out this year for wrestling came out because they thought there would be a state tournament."
His daughter is disappointed. "Compared to last year, we had a lot more girls come out, and now it's like we've been cheated," said Jill Remiticado, who captured the women's Cadet National Championship at 114 pounds last summer in New Orleans.
"All these girls trained and trained, and now we find there won't be anything. I've been hearing since last year we'd have our own tournament."
Frey said he does not understand why the three-league rule was invoked so late.
He said that when the boys held their first state tournament in 1965, fewer than three leagues were operation.
Robert and Melodie Robertson of Pearl City, whose daughter, Heather, won an OIA title at 130 pounds last year, said they want to see a court injunction stop the boys' tournament from being held without the girls.
"The whole team was looking forward to it," said Melodie Robertson. "I'm not at all happy about this."
Ironically, the scrapping of the tournament came at the same Monday meeting of the HHSAA to which soccer parents, massed outside the Kamehameha security gate, were denied access and threatened with arrest when they refused to leave.
Those parents were protesting late notice about the transfer of the girls' state soccer tournament from Aloha Stadium to Maui to make way for a Mariah Carey concert on Feb. 21. Gov. Ben Cayetano intervened on Tuesday to keep the tournament on Oahu and have it played at Aloha Stadium the last week of this month.
"We were at the bottom of the hill that morning at Kamehameha, asking, 'What do you have to hide?'" said Jill Nunokawa, an advocate of sports gender equity, who led the parent protest. "Now we know the answer. They have a lot to hide."
Nunokawa said this latest action puts the HHSAA in more danger of a class action federal lawsuit under terms of Title IX, the law that guarantees girls the same opportunities as boys in athletics.
"They don't seem to get it. When you have the under-represented sex interested in participating in a sport, Title IX clearly states that you must fully accommodate that interest."
The HHSAA executive board is made up of principals from each of the state's five athletic leagues. On Oahu, those principals are HHSAA president Anthony Ramos (Kamehameha) and vice president Norman Minehira (Leilehua).
Ramos said parents aren't invited to HHSAA meetings because it became a nonprofit private corporation when it broke off from the Department of Education.
