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On the first day of April, Kenny Johnson, coach of the Waianae Tigers football team, arrived at Maili Community Park before 5 a.m. 

The sports field permitting office wouldn’t be letting people in for a few more hours. But Johnson knew there would be stiff competition to get monthly field permits for his youth team in Waianae.

“I put a chair by the door” to hold his place, he said. Then he went back to his car and waited.

Johnson does this ritual most months to secure precious practice space for his team. In addition, he attends twice-a-year sports council meetings with eight other football teams as they discuss how to allocate practice areas along the Waianae Coast. 

While the number of sports fields on Oahu is stagnant, the demand for permits is high and keeps getting higher. Sports leagues continue to pop up, and more are turning into year-round activities. Adult leagues also compete for the same patches of grass.

Coaches say it’s a good problem that so many kids are playing sports. But it’s still a problem, especially since many parks are behind on maintenance.

A Growing Number Of Teams

The problem goes beyond the West Side. 

Kawehi Kamalamalama, president of the football and cheerleading team Kailua Mustangs, brought it up at Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s Kailua town hall in March. And Pearl City legislators Sen. Brandon Elefante and Rep. Gregg Takayama this year to allow the public to use its facilities during non-school hours. Both resolutions died.

One reason for the growing demand for fields is that many parents hope their kids can get athletic scholarships to offset the high cost of college. Decades ago, they might have enrolled their kids in football just during the fall. But year-round sports provide an opportunity to get a competitive edge.

Now, football has a fall season and a spring season, increasing the number of teams that want to use fields. It’s a nationwide trend. 

Parks try to squeeze in as many teams as they can. The city tries to permit different sports on sections of the same field by, for instance, allowing baseball fielding practice at the same time as football.

“It’s almost getting to be like a military planning precision on how you allocate this resource to the maximum number of people possible,” said Department of Parks and Recreation Director Laura Thielen.

‘Everybody Always Asks For The Maximum That They Can Get’

Johnson said that the Waianae Tigers, composed of several age groups of flag football and tackle football teams, has permits for different fields on different days.  

Maili Kai Community Park, where Johnson was able to get a monthly permit for a tackle team on Mondays, is sunny and hot. Holes in the ground make running hazardous. 

Johnson has players warm up in an area without so many holes, and mostly uses Mondays to walk through plays for their Saturday games, he said.

“The ideal is the premier field, which is Pililaau,” Johnson said. 

Pililaau Community Park is much shadier than Maili Community Park. It also has lights, unlike Waianae Boat Harbor, another practice spot for Johnson’s Waianae Tigers.

Team Blessed Athletics, the other big football organization in Waianae, was able to get permits for Pililaau Community Park four days a week during December’s sports council meeting for allocating spring season permits. 

The methods for allocating fields vary by region.

In the case of the Waianae Coast, priority goes to the teams with the most players. 

On Team Blessed Athletics, those players are spread over four tackle teams, about 15 flag teams and one pylon team for boys and one for girls, team president Kuna Kaio said. Pylon football is a newer and faster-paced variant with fewer players on the field at a time.

All of these players means that Team Blessed Athletics got priority this season. 

Sports council meetings can be stressful as each coach angles for the best fields for their kids.

During December’s football meeting, Waianae teams drew from a deck of cards to determine their order. Team Blessed Athletics was able to get two picks per round rather than one because it has so many players, Kaio said. It used the picks to request permits for Pililaau Community Park.

With a limited number of slots for the good fields, “everybody always asks for the maximum that they can get,” Thielen said. 

Sometimes teams try to inflate their chance by saying they have more players than they do, Thielen said, so the department requests rosters.

Teams can report other teams that book fields but never use them, Thielen said. Wrongdoers have to face their peers at the twice-a-year in-person sports council. For that reason, Thielen said, the department wants sports council meetings to remain in-person even as it moves its scheduling system online.

Park Quality

Johnson said it’s not just the number of fields, but the quality.

“If we had all the fields looking like Pililaau, there’s no issues,” he said. 

But many of Honolulu’s parks, especially on the West Side, are in a sorry state. They often lack shade and the grass dries into dirt during the summer. Many lack lights that would allow night practices.

The Honolulu City Council adopted a resolution in April asking the Department of Parks and Recreation to state Department of Education facilities, “particularly in park districts where the demand for field space exceeds the availability of Honolulu recreational facilities.”

DOE spokesperson Nanea Kalani said that principals are in charge of approving requests to use school facilities and that there is already a procedure for the city to make those requests.

But Thielen said she would like the DOE to encourage principals to help out, a request she recently made to Superintendent Keith Hayashi.