LIHUE — Kauai High School’s boys volleyball team rallied against the tenacious Menehune to take a 3-2 win — 21-25, 25-14, 16-25, 25-22 and 15-10 — Tuesday night before a big crowd at the Kauai High gym.
“We did it,” said Enoch A‘ana, Kauai’s coach. “It was a close match throughout, but we were able to pull it off. We lost the first game of the first round, and to take this game after being down 2-1 is a great morale booster for the team.”
The Red Raiders battled strong from the opening serve and dug into its roster depth while capitalizing on Waimea miscues to take a 19-17 lead in the first set. A Keane Tibon hit put Kauai in the lead, 21-20, but the Menehune claimed five straight points for the win.
The battle, peppered with crowd-pleasing long volleys, continued with Kauai rebounding to take the second set, 25-14.
Waimea built on its early 3-0 lead in the third set, holding Kauai at bay until a service error deadlocked the match at 9-9. Kauai tied it, 10-10, on a hit by Joshua Garcia, but Waimea’s Regis Lomongo served up a string of points to an 18-10 lead en route to the third set win that came on a Kauai service error.
The Menehune built up a six-point lead, 18-12, in the fourth set behind a string of serves from Shayne Medeiros-Simbre before the error bug surfaced and gave Kauai a 23-22 lead behind a Menehune hitting error. From there, Rivera put one away, and a Tibon block for point forced the fifth set, 25-22.
“Just had to suck it up,” Rivera said. “In warm ups, a guy came up and I could feel the ankle go. But I just sucked it up and played. I could feel the ankle whenever I had to go up.”
Waimea opened the tie-breaking set with solid hits from Bronson Kailikini and Lomongo, answered by a hit from Kauai’s Kaimani Tecson. A string of Menehune miscues put Kauai up, 5-4, before Medeiros-Simbre’s push deadlocked the match, 6-6, only to have a pair of errors put the Raiders in control.
More Menehune errors and a Tecson bang gave Kauai a three-point advantage, 11-8, en route to the 15-10 final that got a finishing touch on a Rivera bang.
“Errors,” said Alton Shimatsu, Waimea coach. “We didn’t handle ourselves right during that long break when officials had to figure out the rotation. We lost focus. It was all mental errors — we need to work on recovering from these mistakes. We’ve had a hard time recovering, we just need to work on it.”
Earlier, the Kauai junior varsity team claimed a 2-1 win over Waimea — 25-13, 18-25 and 25-23.
“Every game from here on out is a big game for us,” Shimatsu said. “We need to work on things before we host Kapaa Friday.”
Waimea hosts the Warriors at the Clem Gomes Gym with the JV matches starting at 5 p.m. followed by the varsity contest starting no earlier than 6:30 p.m. Kauai will visit the Wilcox Gymnasium to take on Island School.
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Dennis Fujimoto, staff writer and photographer, can be reached at 245-0453 or dfujimoto@thegardenisland.com.
