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A few years ago when I was covering preps for this newspaper, I started pound-for-pound rankings for wrestling.
My original idea was to make it a straight Top 10 list, with boys and girls mixed together and girls Teshya Alo of Kamehameha and Lalelei Mataafa of Lahainaluna in the top two spots above the best boys wrestler. My reasoning was that Leilehua’s Liam Corbett had more of a chance of losing than the two girls.
I wussed out and made separate lists, figuring that if I am going to take calls from angry parents I might as well take twice as many. Nearly a decade later, the idea of mixing the lists doesn’t seem as scary.
The Hall of Honor selected its latest class on Sunday, the committee emerging from its long meeting with a list of 12 student athletes despite the challenge of comparing spring sports kids who had one season after their freshman years against others who played in an extra season. Spring sports were canceled for two years due to COVID, while athletes from the other seasons lost only their junior campaigns.
Choosing the Hall of Honor isn’t an easy task, but the committee almost got it right. They almost always get it right, even did when I was there.
The interesting thing, to me, is that they elected seven girls and five boys in the class of 12, the second straight year with more girls than boys. There has never been a quota, it is just how it works out.
There have been more girls than boys in successive years before, most recently in 2011 and ’12, and in 2018 the split was eight girls and only three boys.
When you look back to the infancy of the Hall of Honor, you can see how things have changed for the fairer sex. We are not talking the ancient days of Patsy Mink and Title IX, although that is what led to these enlightened times. We are talking about the early 1990s, which seems so long ago but is a blink of an eye.
The first Hall of Honor class featured nine boys and three girls — Linda Jackson of Mililani, Kahuku’s Pam Nihipali and Joy Purdy of Hana — and the discrepancy grew from there. Three more girls made it in 1984 and only two made it in 1985.
Those girls must have been quite incredible to break into the boys club at all.
In 1991, volleyball standout Dierdre Wisneski of Waimea was the only girl in the 12-person class and it wasn’t until 1995 (more than a decade into the program) that girls earned an equal split. We will call that the Hall of Honor’s enlightenment.
Three years after that, the girls broke through. They earned eight of the 12 spots at the table, the first time there were more females than males.
The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team just recently earned equal pay with its men’s counterparts and the female athletes at Campbell have been in litigation over getting equal treatment, including their own locker room, since 2018.
But the Hall of Honor has been ahead of its time for a long time. Despite no quotas at all, there have been the same number of girls as boys selected since 2001. Yes, the same number and it happens by accident.
One thing that worries me, and I am not alone, is that there were only two kids who lettered in three sports this year, and half the class is made up of specialists who played only one sport. The seasons lost to the pandemic might have had an effect on that, but it’s been the trend for a decade. There were as many single-sport specialists elected in the past 10 years (42) as in the previous 25 years.
Maybe that is just the complaint of a guy from a different generation, but college coaches say they agree even though they probably wouldn’t sniff a kid who spent his valuable time doing passing drills rather than risk injury over a pole vault pit.
Moanalua’s Blaze Sumiye is one of those who earned three letters and it didn’t seem to hurt his wrestling game. He proved to be quite a pass rusher in his lone season of football and the memories made there have to count for something.
This year’s two outstanding wrestlers and judoka — Erin Hikiji of Mililani and Sumiye — were the OIA’s lone representatives this year. It would be absurd to try to sort out which one is the better wrestler between the 98-pound girl and the 178-pound boy, right?
Yes, but not as absurd as it was not so long ago.
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