State football tournament comes up with option

High school football administrators called an option pitch on fourth down and gained enough ground to move the chains with a new set of downs for the 2017 state football tournament.

Despite heavy political maneuvering for a month that left the future of the tournament in limbo, cooler heads have prevailed. The Hawaii High School Athletic Association football committee, tasked with the difficult mission of trying to make all five of Hawaii’s high school leagues happy, ironed out a compromise Friday at the HHSAA headquarters on the Kaimuki High campus.

The new format will be a trimmed-down version of the three-tiered pilot program that began last year. Instead of six teams in two divisions and eight in another, all three tiers will have four teams, which is an overall decrease of eight teams.

It’s a trimming of the fat, in a sense. With fewer teams participating, the competition to make the cut will be that much greater.

In the top-tiered Division I-Open, the make-up will be three OIA teams (its Division I champion, runner-up and third-place team) and one from the ILH (whoever comes out on top among the Big Three of Saint Louis, Punahou and Kamehameha).

The middle-tiered Division I will be an interesting mix that includes all three neighbor island champions — the Big Island Interscholastic Federation, Maui Interscholastic League and Kauai Interscholastic Federation. The fourth team will be either Damien or St. Francis of the ILH, whichever team places higher in the playoffs.

The lowest-tiered Division II participants will consist of the D-II champions from the OIA, BIIF and MIL, along with one of two teams from the ILH — either ‘Iolani or Pac-Five, whichever team finishes higher in the league playoffs.

A few months ago, ILH officials met and decided on those state declarations mentioned above for its seven teams.

“I truly believe it’s a step forward,” HHSAA executive director Chris Chun said after Friday’s three-hour meeting. “Competitively the way the three divisions are set up, every game is going to be a close one now. Every team is where they belong. Even though we might not be a three-tier state based upon on how leagues are broken down, I do believe competitively, we are three tiers. Allowing the leagues to choose which divisions they want is a good benefit and it will lead to better games, safer games and games kids will remember for the rest of their lives.”

Essentially, the compromise was two-pronged:

>> Saving the three tiers was important to the four leagues (all but the OIA) who voted to continue that format at the Hawaii Interscholastic Athletic Directors Association meeting in June.

>> Cutting an ILH team from the top tier was important to the OIA, which felt that two ILH teams up there would be out of balance compared to the percentage of participating teams. This 3-1 ratio of Division-I Open qualifiers more directly corresponds with the total teams competing in each of those two Oahu leagues (22 in OIA and seven in ILH) than the 4-to-2 ratio used for last year’s pilot program. And that ratio is more in line with the formula the HHSAA uses to determine league representation at state tournaments for all sports.

“What’s good about the formula is every kid in the state, no matter what school you go to, big or small, you’ve got the same shot as every other kid,” Chun said.

The three-tiered format was in jeopardy when it ran into a political landmine after the June HIADA vote. That’s when the OIA caused some legislative havoc when it announced it would only declare teams for two of the three divisions. That sent the football committee scrambling to find a way to make the three tiers work, and it made the save on Friday.