Growing up in Hilo, when he was just another sports-minded keiki, Alden Arakaki was earnestly interested in basketball. He played the game daily, practiced shooting and ball-handling and had a childhood fantasy of one day being a player of some consequence, until his father interceded.
“He just told me one day, ‘Look at our family, look at me, we are not big people,’” Arakaki recalled last week. “He said it would be best to drop basketball and pay more attention to baseball.
“I could see he was right, so yeah, I started concentrating on baseball.”
That led to a varsity role on the Hilo High School team where he played second base and got in some mop up duty on the mound here and there until he blew out his ulnar collateral elbow ligament, just as former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Tommy John once did, but ever since, UCL reconstruction has simply been referred to as “Tommy John surgery.”
That was the end of baseball, but the damaged elbow didn’t hurt his drumming, which he did professionally, for a time in the band Beyond Velouria, while he attended UH-Hilo off and on. He eventually graduated with a degree in bible studies from Eternity Bible College, near Los Angeles before returning to the Big Island, where he took a teaching position at Christian Liberty Academy in Keaau. It has been at that small school where his coaching path has begun to reveal itself.
He knew baseball some, he liked basketball a lot, but while his father’s advice was well-reasoned, Arakaki soon jumped into basketball in 2018, when he assisted former coach Matt Summers on the girls junior varsity team at CLA.
When Summers returned to his home state of Michigan, Arakaki found himself the head coach in girls basketball last November, on the first varsity team the school had ever fielded.
“It was a little daunting, I guess,” he said of taking on that responsibility so soon, “but we were all sort of on the same page.”
That’s because, as a school with only 43 students, and just 17 of them girls, Arakaki was literally in charge of a varsity team with no history, no experience at all in BIIF Division II.
On the bright side, Arakaki had nine girls tryout for the squad, statistically more than half of the girls in the school.
They all made the team.
“It has been a pretty cool experience, actually,” he said, “we’ve all grown into it together and I think we did pretty well, we got off to a good start.”
For a first year program, the Canefire recorded a 2-10 record, better than might have been predicted for a school with such an abbreviated background in the sport, but apart from the record, CLA was very competitive with all of the D-II schools, other than Kamehameha, which had its way with them.
They lost three games after being ahead or tied in the last two minutes, an indication that they were within grabbing distance of a potential 5-5 finish, which would have been enough to rattle cages throughout the Division II ranks statewide.
The structure was laid, and now, even without a home court on which to compete, CLA is in on equal footing with a lot of schools whose coaches have some talent and an ability to compete.
But do they know how to win?
That’s next season’s goal.
“We set our goals high,” Arakaki said, “we set a goal of reaching the state tournament. We didn’t make it, but we weren’t too far away, we definitely had a chance.”
They knew the opportunity was there when they opened their first varsity season with a 34-30 loss at Kohala, a team that finished one game ahead of them in the standings at 3-8. There was a 58-57 loss to Honokaa (4-7), and a 24-21 defeat against Hawaii Prep Academy, the BIIF runner-up.
They were blown out by DI schools Konawaena, Hilo and Waiakea, but the 49-43 victory against D-I Kealakehe — on its Senior Night — in the season’s last game meant they finished the season with success and some hope for the future.
“A lot of people thought we were going to be junk,” said senior Kassey Hanoa, who finished her high school career by pouring in 21 points in her last game, “but we were really pretty competitive. I knew we’d be tough to beat in D-II and yeah, there’s a foundation now, there’s something to build on.”
Hanoa shot 40 percent from beyond the 3-point line, Arakaki said, and was probably the most experienced player at the school, having competed in the game since she played for the FlyGirls club team as a second-grader. That contrasts to one player who held a basketball in her hands for the first time in her life when tryouts started in November, two others had just one year of junior varsity ball behind them.
“A really good thing was their attitude, all season,” Arakaki said. “Here at our school, we place a premium on character development, representing God well, representing the school well and playing together as a team, like a family.
“I think we did all those things,” he said, “and the comments I got from the coaches on the teams we played were very complimentary, they all indicated we were headed in the right direction.”
For Arakaki, that meant his limited coaching background, buttressed by conversations with Summers on details of practices and drills and his own research in coaching websites such as Basketball Immersion that discuss general plays, various defenses and philosophies, helped him get his arms around the new role he learned he’d be taking on just last August.
“It all seems like a whirlwind right now,” Arakaki said, “but after the season, I took a couple days away from it and then I watched tape of every game we played, went through them all.
“I came up with eight possessions that would have changed everything for us had they gone differently. We actually could have got to state, but I have no complaints with what we did, we were right there, but our narrative all season, except for those D-I games, was that we were close, or maybe ahead, and then in those last two minutes, something would happen, that’s where we need to improve.”
At the end, it’s the details, usually a breakdown in fundamentals, that cost the Canefire a berth in the state tournament, and for a lot of schools, that’s a familiar circumstance.
The difference between all the others and Christian Liberty Academy, is that all those others have been playing girls basketball for a long time — a decade or more in some cases — and they have more than just 17 girls attending the school.
Success in sports usually requires a winning season, but the first varsity season for this school was an outlier. It started with success, a precursor to winning.
Send column suggestions for teams and people to barttribuneherald@gmail.com
