LIHUE — The Warriors won on the road to kick off the Kauai Interscholastic Federation girls basketball season. Kapaa High School’s varsity team defeated Kauai High, 35-27, Tuesday evening at Kauai High School. Though the Warriors were glad to get
LIHUE — The Warriors won on the road to kick off the Kauai Interscholastic Federation girls basketball season.
Kapaa High School’s varsity team defeated Kauai High, 35-27, Tuesday evening at Kauai High School.
Though the Warriors were glad to get the win, head coach William Aki said there is definitely room for improvement the team can work on as the season progresses — specifically taking better care of the ball.
“It wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be. I wanted to be a bit more controlled. Kind of played a little sloppy out there,” Aki said. “A win is a win, but we need to control the ball a little bit better — play a little bit more sound. Hopefully, we’ll get it together. We got one more week to prepare for the next team.”
Warriors junior guard Paea Tafea, too, said the team was fortunate to come out with a win.
“We still have a lot of stuff to work on,” Tafea said. “We just got to work together. We’re good as a team and we have talent, but it’s just that we got to work together as a team. That’s the main thing.”
“We just got to work on patience and setting everything up before we throw the ball in,” she added. “If we don’t work together, we can’t win. We just got lucky today.”
Kapaa (1-0 KIF) out-rebounded Kauai, leading to second chance opportunities to help get the edge. The Warriors totaled 38 rebounds to the Red Raiders’ 22. Warriors junior guard Paea Tafea led the team with 15.
“Took advantage of size, but we really didn’t utilize that much on the offensive side,” Aki said. “We could have pounded it on the low post and just work it from there. We tried to take too much perimeter shots instead of going inside first.”
Kauai High head coach James Dingus said following a closely contested first half, after which Kapaa led only by three, his team ran out of steam toward the end.
“They do have a lot of long, tall girls. That’s hard to compete with, and they played to that,” Dingus said. “We had talked all week about making sure we rebound, box out and compete. In the second half, we kind of ran out of gas and wasn’t able to keep doing that.”
Dingus also gave credit to Kapaa’s defense.
“They played a really hard, really smart game. When they went to their 1-2-2 full-court press, it took us out of our game. They got some turnovers, and that’s what created a lot of separation,” he said. “At same time, really proud of our girls. They played their hearts out. They did everything we talked about in practice.”
Warriors senior center Siokapesi Pauai had 14 points and eight rebounds for Kapaa. Tafea had 11 points, three assists and a block.
Sophomore center Taegan Keep had eight points, eight rebounds and four blocks for the Red Raiders. Junior guard Monique Tomacder also had eight points.
Kapaa also won the junior varsity game, 46-31.
Kauai (0-1 KIF) will next play on Friday at Waimea High School. The JV game will begin 5:30 p.m. and the varsity will follow. Kapaa will host Waimea on Tuesday.
