HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – The Hawaii high school baseball season is about to pick up and one of the teams gearing up for the new year are the Lahainaluna Lunas.
The team has had to navigate practices with the challenges still facing their community.
“These boys are really amazing,” Lahainaluna interim head coach Emmett Markulis told Hawaii News Now. “We ask a lot of them right now and they just do it, they just do it and they don’t complain.”
Like many people in West Maui, the affects of the August 8th wildfires are still impacting daily life. In the case of the Lahainaluna baseball team, they are left without a full-time facility to prepare for the season that is set to start this month.
In year’s past here’s how the Lunas would practice, they don’t have a field on campus so they would have to commute off campus to a community park, however after the fires the park is being used as a staging area for recovery efforts.
In the meantime, they are on the Luna’s football field, which will work for now, but they have a solution — an open plot of land above Sue D Cooley Stadium.
“It’s not a full size field in terms of regulation baseball, but it would be, if done right, a perfectly good place for us to practice and not have to have the kids travel from school down to and from, and try to get to practice.” Markulis said.
The team is asking for donations through the Luna Strong fund to help get this area of on-campus land ready for next season.
Not only helping the immediate team, but for teams to come as the baseball Lunas look to have the same impact their football brothers had on their community.
And after going winless last year, rewrite the story on Lunas baseball.
“(The team) could write a story of a lifetime, you know, they’ve dealt with a laundry list of challenges and they’ve stayed positive this long,” Markulis said. “If you can continue to stay positive and approach this year as an opportunity and the gift that it is, you know, maybe we can write a story.”
For more information on donating to the baseball team and other Lahainaluna athletics, click here.
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