A typical basketball team on an
Island Plantation (Wailuku Sugar
Company). Note racial ancestry of
the different players.

E. L. Damkroger

Director of Recreation

Alexander House Community Ass’n

Wailuku, Maui, T. H.

 

BASKETBALL IN HAWAII

F the basketball world today were to select a
™ “capital” for this sport on the basis of number
of players per capita, the Territory of Hawaii,
America’s Gibralter of the Pacific, would win in a
walk. On each of the six principal islands of our
group, Oahu, Maui, Hawaii, Kauai, Lanai and Mo-
lokai, you will find the boys in our grammar schools
learning to play basketball along with the arith-
metic and other studies. On the Island of Maui,
where the writer lives, with a population of 48,000
in 1940, we had four hundred and thirty-four or-
ganized basketball teams in leagues playing for
island championships in their respective classes un-
der the supervision of one organization. Every one
of our 27 grammar schools on Maui has a “varsity”
team which plays in the islandwide school league.

Hawaii is an agricultural community with sugar
cane and pineapple being its main products. Ours
is, therefore, mainly a rural community life organ-
ized into plantations, with the major portion of the
population living in small villages. Basketball, as
a recreation, fits into the picture much better than
any other sport, and visitors will find gymnasia
and outdoor electrically lighted courts in most of
our plantation villages and centers. Every village
has several teams, some plantations having as many
as fifty or more. Incidentally, it is recognized by
leaders in recreation that our industrial recreational
setup is second to none in America.

Basketball, better than any other sport, offers us
a great opportunity to teach American ideals in
action. American boys, sons of the many races to
be found in our “melting pot” of the Pacific, learn
true Americanism through basketball. I have seen

many teams whose entire personnel did not have
two players of the same racial extraction.

Every school in our splendid educational system,
from the University of Hawaii to the smallest gram-
mar school, boasts of from one to several basket-
ball teams.

A handicap to be found in meeting mainland
teams (and we have teams visit us yearly from the
coast universities) is height. Our athletes, especially
those of Japanese, Filipino, and Chinese parentage,
are not, on the whole, as tall as the average athletes
of other racial groups.

Each year Hawaii prints a sports annual of its
own containing records, championships and other
important athletic information. More space is de-
voted to basketball than any other sport. Here you
will find listed the annual Territorial AAU cham-
pionship winners, the Territorial high school cham-
pionship winners, the leading plantation teams,
service teams and other teams in Territorial wide
competition. The Army and Navy, with their large
service population, play a big part in our athletic
life, especially on the Island of Oahu.

When Dr. Naismith started basketball at Spring-
field College fifty years ago, he little realized that
he was giving into the hands of recreational leaders
in America’s outpost in the Pacific a medium, val-
uable beyond measure, for teaching and expressing
those democratic ideals that we love and want to
preserve as our American way of life. So, as no.
other word can express it, Aloha to the memory of
a great American who started something that is
100 per cent American and always will be —

BASKETBALL.

PRINTED BY DAVIS, DELANEY & HARRS, INC., NEW YORK

 

 

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