If Kamehameha-Hawaii and Mid-Pacific should meet again – and their pedigree suggests they should– the Warriors will pay extra attention to Ciera Kameehonua.
All Kamehameha could do Saturday night was pay homage to the emerging junior guard.
Doomed by a slow start, Kameehonua then did the Warriors in, scoring 25 points with six 3-pointers as the Owl rolled to their first HHSAA Division II girls championship with a 63-38 victory at Neal Blaisdell Center in Honolulu.
“We were keying on (Brilie Kovaloff) and trying to shut her down,” Warriors coach Weston Willard. “Some days the shots don’t fall, and they didn’t for us. They did for (Ciera). All you can do is tip your cap to her.”
Harley Simon, the lone senior for the top-seeded Owls (14-0), scored 22 points and made all nine of her free throws, but the real thorn in the BIIF champion Warriors’ side was Kameehonua, who looked nothing like a player that had made just nine 3-pointers on the season.
She shot 8 of 11 from the field and grabbed 1o rebounds.
“I was going through a really big slump,” Kameehonua said on the statewide broadcast, “but coach kept telling me to work, and my dad was telling me to have confidence in myself … and I just brought it out.”
Jordyn Mantz scored 18 points for Kamehameha (11-4), which was vying for its fifth D-II title but had to settle for its sixth runner-up finish, second in a row and third in the past four seasons.
The game started out inauspiciously enough for the No. 2 Warriors when an Owls player scored the opening basket of the game by bouncing a ball of the back of a Kamehameha player on an inbounds play and making a layup.
The Warriors missed free throws and committed turnovers early on and didn’t score until Dominique Pacheco’s free throws made the score 12 -2. Kamehameha’s first field goal came on a layup by Makenzie Kalawaia with 1:46 left in the first quarter.
But down 17-4 and with Kameehonua just getting going, the game already had gotten away from Kamehameha, which shot 45 percent and was outrebounded 36-25.
“It was an interesting first couple of minutes,” Willard said. “If we can make our free throws and take a lead, I think it could have been a different game. But we didn’t, and we kind of got rattled.”
Pacheco scored seven points, Kalawaia had six and Saydee Aganus finished with five points for the junior-laden Warriors.
Mid-Pacific avenged a loss to Kamehameha in last year’s semifinals, and few people would be surprised if these two teams battle it out in the 2018 final as well.