Come watch Kalani’s sports team this year through this year’s activity card! As the new Kalani school year begins and sports such as volleyball and football begin their seasons, Kalani encourages students to attend sports events. The spirit card allows students into all sports events for free after the one-time purchase. The hope for these cards is to motivate students and their school spirit as Kalani enters its fall sports season.
Coach Kenric Pai is the new head coach for Kalani’s football team and hopes to do the same for his players, motivating and encouraging them to put passion and hard work into the season. He hopes to share his philosophies and ways of coaching.
“I come from a kind of a disciplined background, just real structured and regimented, so I try to bring that in here,” Coach Pai stated. “My thought process this year was to make ‘off the field’ training, mental and physical, make that the basis of our philosophy.”
This year’s football team is overall very young, with approximately 20 seniors leaving the team last year and over 20 of the new players being freshmen this year.
This led to Coach Pai’s decision to get rid of Kalani’s JV football team altogether. A dramatic change in Kalani’s football team system, but one Coach Pai hopes will help the team out in the long-term.
“I think for me it’s that they hear just one voice,” Coach Pai explained. “It’s that theory of having too many chiefs, you just want to have more people following and doing what you’re asking rather than having too many bosses on the field and all these voices that the kids don’t know what to listen to.”
It’s clear both Kalani administration and Coach Pai share a common goal both for average students and football players. Increasing the amount of “pride” and school spirit students have for their sports teams. Coach Pai hopes to do this through implementing his new coaching and merging the teams into one. While Kalani encourages students to attend games by making them more accessible overall.
Kalani’s Homecoming game comes up this September, but despite the challenges Kalani’s new team may face with the changes, Coach Pai is optimistic that these changes will help the team improve in the long run.
“I think we got to just roll with the punches and have kind of a plan what you normally do,” Coach Pai explains. “Kind of have a system and you’ll expect to have curveballs or changes and you just got to be able to adjust and adapt and ultimately everyday if you have a goal in mind there’s 10 different ways you can accomplish that same goal, so even though something might come and spin your schedule off track you got to find another way to focus to accomplish that goal you have set for that day.”
