It is, in essence, the original Beautiful Game. While the design is wonderful DNA, the guts of the system is work ethic. Like anything else, nothing worth working for is acquired without blood, sweat and tears, and not necessarily in this order.
# Ikaika 8th Grade update
We finished tied with Sharks in our pool. They get the top seed from our pool based on tiebreaker (head to head).
Our quarterfinal game is tomorrow (Saturday), 5:50 pm, at McCully gym against Kiawe Heat, the 3rd-place team from the other pool. Tough team, always battling. I will be stuck at work in Kahuku. Coach Seth Mckinney and/or Coach David Shinbara will coach you. You will be fine. Probably will play your best basketball, as often is the case when Seth and David are coaching.
New season ahead. Our Pups have worked so hard to get better. They earned this shot to win the championship. #h1thunder #greatteammates
Done with the videos for our H1 Thunder squad that won the Intermediate Division title at the Maui Summer Classic. The links below are for full game footage and, where noted, highlights only.
It takes 5-6 hours to compress and export full games, then another hour to load onto YouTube. One game took 7 hours to compress/export. The Pool Play games at Maui had 22-minute halves instead of the 16 we have on Oahu, so the footage is longer. Often, it was longer than my Sony Handycam could handle (2 games max, if that), so Joel kindly pulled out his iPhone to shoot the remainder of games.
Huge Mahalo to Joel for making this happen. He shot a total of 13 games in five days (7 Intermediate, 6 JV). Thank you for blessing everyone with these memories for a lifetime!
Because YouTube doesn't like mixing formats (Handycam + iPhone), I've split the footage into parts. If I kept the footage combined, YouTube would knock the quality level down to 460 instead of 720. (That's what happened with our highlight videos.)
The Maui Classic JV Division videos are almost done. I've got to get some footage from Joel's phone for a few of those games to make it complete. (Highlights were posted during and immediately after the tourney.) Same with the links for our Kalani Varsity League games. One game is missing; Coach Bino said he has the footage loaded up on his computer. We were gone on Maui at the time and he saved the footage since there were 4 games to shoot that week (including games from Le Jardin JV League).
I've finally got highlight videos for the 9 games our Thunder won in JV and Intermediate Divisions at the Maui Summer Classic. (I might get to the losing games later.)
To save you time, the videos and links are all in this post. HUGE MAHALO to Joel Gormley for shooting the game videos. There was limited space in the camera; often times, he had to use his phone to shoot the final minutes of games. This is on top of all the driving and organizing and support he provided for all our keiki.
Memories for a lifetime. THANK YOU, JOEL!
Note: Full-game footage videos will be online later. Catching up with these videos from Maui, and now with the past three games at the Le Jardin League, is time consuming. Please bear with me. Thank you for your patience.
Tuesday, July 21
Upcountry Elite 45, H1 Thunder 30, JV Division (pool play) — no video yet
Southside's Finest 50, H1 Thunder 43, 8th Grade Division (pool play) — no video yet
## The Last Supper (on Maui) ##
Tasty Crust in Wailuku. Last time I ate here was with Dave Reardon some years back after a state tourney game. the. H1 Thunder boys feel right at home here and everywhere on Maui. They all want to come back next year. After Vegas and maybe Anaheim.
Photos July 22-26, 2015
## Maui Trip; Day 6 R&R ##
Left early for Haleakala. None of the kids got out of bed. After 13 games in 5 days. I don't blame them. They can do Haleakala next time. It was semi-cold: 50 degrees.
11 am and the manager is graciously allowing us a late checkout. The guys are in the pool and were at the adjacent beach with Aunty Suzy on lookout.
They ate some weird spam sandwich thing for breakfast since I wasn't here to cook. OK...
We fly back to HNL 809 pm flight. Wish there were a few more days of nothingness here. Maui kinda grows on you.
Aunty Tami was my catsitter.
Special Mahalo to all the moms who allowed their Thunder sons to play in the Maui Summer Classic.
