What Keith Amemiya called the biggest prep sports event in Maui County history turned into the biggest bungle in HHSAA history.

Maui and Baldwin were declared co-champions of the Wally Yonamine Foundation/HHSAA Division I State Baseball Tournament on Saturday, two winners and more than a few losers.

The tournament was 10 games of baseball bliss, half of them decided by a single run, that had participants and spectators on the edge of their seats.

The glorious festivities ended in the rain on Saturday at Moanalua after two innings and multiple rain delays left the Hawaii High School Athletic Association scrambling for cover. The organization seemed to be baffled that it might rain in May and only had Les Murakami Stadium for four days.

According to the HHSAA, they couldn’t play Saturday morning at UH before Farrington’s post-graduation lei presentations at 9 p.m. because it was not available, and Saturday night on Maui was offered to the schools but didn’t work logistically. So that left a somber scene at Moanalua after the high of two intense semifinal contests.

It was the first time two Maui teams were in the state final.

These kinds of missteps have happened before. In 2006, the OIA declared Tadd Fujikawa and Chan Kim co-champions in boys golf when golf coordinator Sam Delos Reyes misinterpreted a paragraph in the organization’s rule book that called for a playoff on Turtle Bay’s Fazio Course. In 2018, Hawaii Prep and Baldwin shared the state title in boys soccer when lightning in the Waipahu area precluded penalty kicks and the Maui players couldn’t bear rising at 7 a.m to play the championship after another night of sleeping on a gym floor.

Every situation is different, but in 2013 things were quite similar. The Mid-Pacific and Mililani baseball programs fought their way to the championship game at Iron Maehara Stadium on Maui only to have it washed out by heavy rains. The difference between now and then, though, was that the HHSAA scrambled and scheduled the title tilt three days later at Les Murakami Stadium back on Oahu.

The Owls topped the Trojans 3-1 when Marcus Doi drove in Quintin-John Collier in the top of the seventh inning, one of the more entertaining championship games in a long list of them since 1959. Pearl City beat Moanalua for the championship in 2011 on a Monday when Saturday’s slate was rained out.

This one could have been pushed to Tuesday except it would have been played by high school graduates, which is no big deal, and some of the players had previous commitments. Maui’s graduation was set for Sunday with Baldwin’s ceremonies today. Iron Maehara Stadium wasn’t available until Tuesday. The tournament was a week later this year because that’s when Les Murakami Stadium was available.

HHSAA Executive Director Christopher Chun has done some good things in his 14 years at the helm and will be remembered as the man who brought state championships in nearly every sport to the neighbor islands, making tiny Kauai feel like it is every bit as important as Oahu. But in this case the HHSAA left Maui feeling overlooked.

“I think every baseball player in the state and every baseball coach in the state knows that if it were two Oahu teams in the final they would have made it happen,” Baldwin coach Craig Okita said. “There are some people who are happy with co-champs, but those are not baseball people.”

Well-meaning folks on Maui are coming out of the woodwork to get the game played, but both coaches have moved on. Players could get together at a park somewhere, which is always preferable to getting adults other than their own coaches involved. The chance of something going wrong increases exponentially the more athletic directors, principals and administrators get their hands on things.

Hopefully the HHSAA takes some lessons from this before we have Kahuku and Saint Louis declared co-champions in football someday, but it’s hard to learn lessons if you feel like you didn’t do anything wrong. As far as the state is concerned, it exhausted every option and planned for every contingency.

I don’t know what the answers are, I only know that if your main task is to declare a champion and that doesn’t happen, something went wrong somewhere.