Moms and dads usually want their kids home at an early hour, but Oahu Interscholastic Association football parents have had to loosen their rules the past two seasons.

That’s because games are ending later and later on Friday nights, so it’s common for players to get home well after midnight.

It all stems from when the Department of Education’s bus contract switched from Gomes to Roberts Hawaii last season. The first priority for Roberts’ fleet of buses is to make end-of-school runs to get public school students home. According to OIA officials, the earliest buses can be available for junior varsity games on Fridays is 3:30 p.m. Add in the travel time and warmups, and the earliest the OIA can schedule the start of the JV games is 5:30 p.m.

After JV games are done, the 25-minute varsity warmups begin, and that is followed by the national anthem and “Hawaii Ponoi,” the coin toss and the schools’ alma maters, often pushing the varsity start times to 7:45 and sometimes even past 8 p.m.

With all of the passing offenses and the clock stoppages that incomplete passes cause, some OIA games are pushing midnight. The Kaiser at Waipahu game on Friday ended at 11:53. The Leilehua at Castle game ended at 11:41. The visiting teams still had to drive back across the island to get to their schools, and then head home, go to sleep and, in some cases, get ready for practice Saturday morning.

There is no easy fix, however, and it appears that the system in place will be there at least until the next bus contract is signed.

“We can’t get earlier pickup,” OIA football coordinator Harold Tanaka said. “They have to make the after-school runs before servicing athletics. We haven’t had complaints as far as I know. It is what it is. We went through this last year, when there were similar end times. Offenses are changing and throwing the ball around a lot more and that makes for longer games.”

Still, the OIA is living with getting athletes home past the witching hour.

“I feel bad for the kids,” Leilehua football coach Nolan Tokuda said. “Sometimes the last time they eat is 3 p.m. before they play the game, take a bus ride home and get back home after midnight, and that is too long.”

There isn’t a problem for the OIA on Saturday nights, when JV games start at 4 p.m., but the OIA schedules fewer games on Saturdays to avoid conflict with University of Hawaii home games and road games on TV. In addition, not every school has a field, so they play on the home fields of other schools that are being used on Friday nights.

One possible fix is for JV games to be played on different days than the varsity games, but that would mean more setup and breakdown and staffing.

“From a community standpoint, having the varsity and JV play on the same night at the same place is ideal,” Castle coach Nelson Maeda said. “Having them play on the same day develops team unity. There is no easy fix, but yeah, the way it is now is not good for the kids. They get home at such a late hour, and it impacts our Saturday morning practices.”

Maeda added that a few of his players, when they get home late after the games, don’t have rides and scramble to catch the city bus.

Tokuda also holds practices on Saturday mornings and thinks it shortchanges the players who get home late and don’t get enough rest.

A year ago, when Roberts and Ground Transport got the Hawaii schools bus contract, the OIA set the Friday JV start time at 6 p.m., but after many complaints about the extra-late varsity end times, a compromise was made to start JV at 5:30.

Since then, Roberts has taken the service over fully, according to the OIA. Gomes, the previous bus service provider for many years, is out of business.

Tanaka, Tokuda and Maeda all said that if there were more reserve buses available, the start times on Fridays could go back to 5 p.m. as in years past, thus mitigating the problem.

“(Having more buses available earlier) might be something they agree upon in the next bus contract,” Maeda said.

As far as earlier times for now and the forseeable future, Tanaka said, “It just can’t be done. We are at the mercy of the (bus) schedule.”

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Nicolas Tom, Kaiser
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