Parade to honor Pahoa Basketball team

[Rob Tucker]

It is really rather remarkable for the Pahoa High School basketball team to win the Division 2 title. For a small village like Pahoa to succeed over the resources of Oahu and Honolulu is impressive.

So there is a Celebratory Parade tomorrow, Saturday at 2 pm in Pahoa Village. The County Band will be there, about fifteen vintage cars carrying the team and cheer leaders and other assorted entries.

I recommend that as many of you as possible try to cheer for the success of this dynamic group of local young people.

Good Job Daggers!

[Guest]

Yea,

Lets all try and be there.

I will be cooking Huli Huli chicken for the team and their family and others.

I believe this will be a great day and the kids need all of the support we can give them.

A show of heads will go a long way in their memories when they look back at Pahoa high school and the town that supported them.

To coin an old saying, "be there or be square"

The Lack

The Lack Toons

[Rob Tucker]

It was a nice little parade all in all. The young men of the Championship basketball team looked happy but unused to being the center of attention. They deserved their moment as well as the coaches and staff. You don't take a small rural Pahoa team to a championship without a lot of hard, dedicated work. And talent.

There were a couple ironies.

Billy Kenoi rode a fire engine leading the county band. So the image of Billy waving and smiling in front of the band he is proposing to eliminate was interesting and complex.

I had been told by one of the organizers of this parade that the parade was for "the boys" and politicians weren't being allowed although they were pressing to be there. Politicians won. There was Billy Kenoi, Emily Naeole-Beason, Faye Hanohano and Russel Kokubun crowding the team's moment in the sun. I found that disappointing.

But the young men of the Pahoa Daggers were the intended stars and in the world of school sports in Hawaii they indeed made history. Good for them.

[mdd7000]

I was very pleasantly surprised to see how many people showed up to give support to these kids that never gave up on themselves all season long. Congrats to them (and the rest of the school).

[Rob Tucker]

Apparently there is an interesting back story on the parade on Tiffany Hunt's site:

More Emily moments.


***Commentary*** Notes On Behind-The-Scene Political Drama Of A Parade

http://www.bigislandchronicle.com/?p=13244#more-13244

[critterlover]

As I wrote on Tiffany's blog tonight, Emily was a guest speaker that morning at our Town Hall Meeting. She no doubt opted to dress for the various events she was attending that day as comfortably and appropriately as she could. She had arrived at our meeting in Hawaiian Shores from a meeting in Hilo earlier that morning. I don't know why in the world anyone would take so much time to blather on about someone's choice of dress when it appears the whole parade event was wonderfully choreographed and well received. It seems that everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves and the Team was duly honored for their incredible sportsmanship.

Those of us in attendance at our Town Hall Meeting were mesmerized by Emily's presentation. From the moment she appeared at the podium to address the members present to the moment she departed she was filled with life and joy and she was fully engaging. Everyone in the audience truly enjoyed her and she set the tone for a fantastic meeting we had even after her departure. After the meeting, so many new people in the community commented on how truly nice it was that the Councilwoman would not only come and spend time with us, bringing us up to speed with what is going on in the community here and at large, but that she would be so personable and engaging. She answered all the questions with a style that only Emily can deliver and had everyone enjoying her humor.

I think we forget when we look at 'politicians' that they are people too and they 'want' to do what is good for their constituents. Learning some of the history of the area from Emily, especially from her childhood, touched those who were there. It was an Emily I have never seen before and I realized at that meeting why she is re-elected.

I am glad the Parade went as well as it did. Kudos to the organizers who obviously spent a lot of time and their own personal monies to try and make it a day for the Pride of Pahoa. These are the things of cohesion for a community and with each successive event the community spirit will develop exponentially. Being from a small town, and having been forced to appear as a baton girl for most of the parades until I was old enough to whine, I know the tendency for the organizers who want things to come off without a hitch to make lists of the 'screw ups' that people make. Horses were not tight enough; the band played the wrong song for the place on the route; the pom pom girls weren't perfectly timed at all times; so and so's mother was too interfering...as a kid I know how hard we practiced for the parade and how hard it was to perform for the whole route of the parade and it was very demoralizing for me to hear all the things that went wrong. It was all stuff the folks watching the parade could careless about,honestly. One year the lady who was in charge was a bossy one and ticked my sister and I off so much with her dictates to us that when we went passed her on the route we purposely performed a routine that instead of passing the batons and doing our thing with finesse we passed them and dropped them...picked them up and dropped them again...mortified my mother but made my sister and I laugh later - in our adolescent reenactment for our folks. Ahhhhh, small towns...such charm.

“A penny saved is a government oversight.”