Amid blue skies and a classic travel poster Waikiki Beach backdrop not many strokes from the Duke Kahanamoku statue, it was announced Monday that Hawaii will become the first state to have official high school surfing championships when competition begins in 2013.

Of course, with an idea decades in the making, arranging the postcard-perfect setting was the easy part.

More arduous has been getting the state’s official individual sport off the drawing board and headed toward the water on a definitive timeline. So, after years of bureaucratic ping pong and wait-’til-forever thinking, the remarkable thing is not only that surfing will join football, volleyball and the other 17 sports offered in 45 public high schools statewide, but that some innovative thought and roll-up-the-sleeves initiative is responsible for making it happen.

Picture, for example, another time that the governor, lieutenant governor and schools superintendent stood arrayed before the cameras and microphones to guarantee the implementation of a sports venture that has yet to be fully funded.

Yet, while they maintained that “outside funding sources” would bankroll surfing without siphoning off a dollar of Department of Education appropriations, officials acknowledged that two-thirds of the projected $150,000 first-year seed money has yet to be raised. They challenged the public in general and surfing community in particular to provide support.

Then, they talked hopefully and boldly about adding body surfing and body boarding down the line.

“If you don’t announce something and get it rolling, oftentimes it will just waffle, waffle and waffle,” said Keith Amemiya, the Board of Education member who has driven the project the past six months since taking the governor’s marching orders.

Indeed, as recently as 2004 there was legislation to authorize surfing, and the BOE unanimously approved it in a policy statement. But, again, nothing happened. Never did it advance beyond the club status it has held since the 1960s.

It might have been the same story this time around if Amemiya, who masterminded the $1.6 million Save Our Sports public school initiative two years ago as executive director of the Hawaii High School Athletic Association, hadn’t been front and center on this one, too.

Way out in front, in fact, soliciting donations and guaranteeing the money will be raised, one way or another. “I don’t think there will be one, but I’m willing to cover any shortfall to make surfing happen,” Amemiya said.

He grasps what folks who have pressed for surfing almost since statehood have been saying. That the importance of surfing extends beyond perpetuating a homegrown sport and celebrating the culture. It is also about adding yet another hook to keep at-risk students who have little interest in other scholastic or extracircular pursuits in school and accountable.

“It is a way to channel a lot of kids’ energy to something positive,” said Carissa Moore, the 2011 Association of Surfing Professionals women’s world champion. “I wish we had it when I was in school.”

Thanks to some enterprising thinking and long-needed hustle, it is a wish that will come true for plenty of future high schoolers.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.