Monday Morning MIL: Baldwin football beats Lahainaluna 14-7 to clinch Bears’ first state tournament berth since 2019
Ethan Bacos is the only player on the Baldwin High School football team this season who endured back-to-back winless seasons in 2022 and 2023.
On Saturday night at Sue Cooley Stadium in Lahaina, Bacos, a 17-year-old senior middle linebacker, rejoiced — perhaps more than any other player on the Baldwin roster — after the Bears clinched their first trip to the First Hawaiian Bank/HHSAA Division I state tournament since 2019.
Baldwin wrapped up the second round of the Maui Interscholastic League Division I race with a hard-fought 14-7 win over Lahainaluna. Baldwin finished 3-1 in the second round after winning the first round of the MIL D-I race with a 2-2 record, which included a 30-point win over Lahainaluna Sept. 20.
Lahainaluna — 2-2 in each round of league play — saw its remarkable MIL record of 17 straight trips to state football tournaments come to an end with Saturday’s result.
“I’m lost for words,” Bacos said with lei draped over his uniform and shoulder pads, up to his chin. “It’s unbelievable. Like, it’s really amazing that I came from my freshman and sophomore years to this … we came so far.”
Meanwhile, Kamehameha Maui wrapped up an 8-0 run through the MIL with a 36-18 win over King Kekaulike on Friday night.
The defending Division II state champion Warriors wrapped up the MIL D-II title last week — they will likely open with a bye into the state tournament semifinals on the weekend of Nov. 21-22. The top two seeds in the six-team D-I and D-II state tournaments host semifinals before the state championship games on Nov. 28 at Mililani High School.
The Bears were 0-8 overall in 2022 when Bacos was the only freshman on the varsity and 0-9 in 2023 when he was a sophomore. They were the only two winless, tie-less seasons in the Wailuku school’s history that dates to 1938.
“Starting from my freshman and sophomore year when we lost every game to come to tonight, D-I (MIL) champs,” Bacos said with a wide smile on his face. “It just feels so amazing and great.”
The Bears had to fight a determined Lunas team for the clinching victory. Baldwin went 76 yards in eight plays with the opening possession of the game to take a 7-0 lead on a 9-yard touchdown pass from Jorden Carbonell to Hiilawe Han with 8 minutes, 58 seconds left in the first quarter.
It remained that way until Lahainaluna’s Kyle Thomas took a jet sweep 73 yards for a touchdown on the first play from scrimmage of the second half, tying the score at 7-7 with 11:43 left in the third quarter.
The Bears took the lead for good when Ryan Coppa caught a 15-yard touchdown pass from Carbonell with 9 minutes to play in the game.
Both teams had chances to score in the final 9 minutes, but the Bears came up big when it mattered the most. Baldwin junior defensive back Jude Smith tackled Lahainaluna receiver Kua Bacalso in the open field at the Bears’ 3-yard line on fourth down with 4:40 to play to stop the Lunas’ best chance to tie the score.
“All I knew was I just had to make that play right then and there or else they would have got the first and goal or scored,” Smith said. “I couldn’t have done it without my defense, each and every one of them.”
Smith added he didn’t realize how big the play he made was until “all my teammates came running at me. I was, like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then I realized that was fourth down and we got the ball back.”
Baldwin took over and ran out the clock from there. One key bounce that went the Bears’ way on the final possession was when Carbonell fumbled a snap and it bounced into the hands of Baldwin running back Kaniela Gragas, who rambled 17 yards for a first down on a third-down play with 2:39 remaining in the game.
Baldwin head coach Cody Nakamura, a 2005 Baldwin graduate, took over as head coach at his alma mater in 2022. The Bears have not had many bounces go their way in recent years.
“It’s kind of flipped this season,” Nakamura said. “The fumble near the end, it hit Carbonell in the knee and bounced into ‘Ela’s hands, our running back, and he goes and gets a first down. That’s never happened to us in the past. It always went the other way. Like, they took it for a touchdown or something.”
Nakamura added, “Those balls didn’t bounce our way in the past, and they have been this season. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.”
Carbonell finished with 82 yards rushing on 16 carries and 128 yards passing, completing 9 of 17 passes with two touchdowns and no interceptions. Carbonell is a senior who was a first-time starter this year — his main sport is soccer.
“This isn’t my number one sport,” Carbonell said. “I came out to play for fun, something else to do. … I’m so stoked that we can go to the states. We’re the team that changed this whole program around.”
In the end, Bacos tipped his cap to the Lunas’ remarkable streak that included 13 straight MIL Division II championships from 2007 to 2019 and four in D-I from 2021 to last season. The Lunas ended their stay in Division II with four straight state championships, from 2016 to 2019. After the 2020 season was wiped out statewide by the COVID-19 pandemic, Lahainaluna moved up to Division I in 2021 and made it to the state championship game, where it lost 38-0 to ‘Iolani.
The Lunas’ 17th straight state tournament berth came when they beat Baldwin 7-3 in a playoff game that ended on a Bears fumble inside the Lahainaluna 2-yard line with less than 30 seconds to go.
Bacos and the Bears knew the Lunas would not let their streak die easily.
“They play really hard,” Bacos said of the Lunas. “We knew we had to just compete. We knew we had to commit tonight. We knew we had to win tonight in order to go to states and get what we wanted.”
Nakamura and his staff reminded the Bears all season that they finished “1 yard” short of a return to the state tournament last season. The Bears will play in a state quarterfinal on the weekend of Nov. 14-15 when the state tournament brackets are announced. Baldwin coaches expect to be seeded No. 4 or 5 in the six-team Division I state tournament.
“It feels amazing for the kids,” Nakamura said. “We put in the work. We let them know what we want out of them. They bought in, and they put in the work for so long, for four years for some of these seniors, from the junior varsity to now.”
The Lunas lose 13 seniors, but several key starters return, including sophomore quarterback Leka Rosenthal and Kyle Thomas, a junior running back/defensive back who finished with 108 yards rushing on 9 carries.
“There’s always lessons to be learned in every contest we play,” Lahainaluna coach Dean Rickard said. “We told the underclassmen that preparation starts tomorrow. That’s just the way it is; our season is over.”
Lahainaluna is also starting to see the effects of declining enrollment. The day before the Aug. 8, 2023, wildfire in Lahaina, the school had 1,012 students. This year, there are 827 students.
“Post-fire, we still had issues with keeping athletes here because of displacements,” Rickard said. “But that can only be used as an excuse. We’ve never used it as an excuse. We use it as kind of a pride thing that, ‘Hey, who’s ever here, you play for this community, you play for this school, and most of all, you play for yourself.’ “
Rickard said that the outcome for his team, which finished 4-6 overall and 4-4 in MIL play, will not signal a complete makeover. The bulk of the Lunas coaching staff has been in place for decades.
“We’ll have a meeting and discuss the direction that we need to go in order to make improvements that we see we need to make,” Rickard said. “At the same time you gotta hand it to Baldwin. They’ve been in our shoes, where we are now, the last two, three years.”
Nakamura marveled at the Lunas’ state tournament streak that included a 46-game, eight-year MIL winning streak that ended last season.
“It’s a well-coached team, highly-disciplined team. They play very hard,” Nakamura said. “They play hard for their town. They play hard for their families, and this was a tough one. They battled tonight, man. We knew it was going to be a war.”
Nakamura summed it up this way for his players.
“I’m proud of them because they bought in and they did the work,” Nakamura said. “We’ll see where it goes from here, and hopefully we can make a little bit of noise (in the state tournament).”
“Monday Morning MIL” columns appear weekly on Monday mornings with updates on local sports in the Maui Interscholastic League and elsewhere around Maui County. Please send column ideas — anything having to do with sports in Maui County — as well as results and photos to [email protected].
