Three major gym renovations on Maui leave sports teams with less space

LAHAINA — High school volleyball practice on Maui traditionally takes place indoors, but that won’t be the case this season for the Lahainaluna High School boys team.

Three major gym renovations, two in West Maui and one in Central Maui, are taking place at the same time, which has left teams like the Lunas searching for practice space. The projects include the $28.5 million overhaul of War Memorial Gym, the $3.7 million upgrade of the Lahaina Civic Center and the $2.6 million repairs to the Lahainaluna gym.

The Lunas’ gym renovation includes fixing the roof that was damaged as a result of the 2023 Lahaina wildfire. It also calls for new exterior gutters, new sound panels on the interior ceiling, demolition and replacement of the gym floor for basketball and volleyball. The work is expected to take six months and be finished by August, in time for the girls volleyball season.

Since Thursday, the Lahainaluna boys volleyball team has been practicing outdoors at Sue D. Cooley Stadium, the on-campus football facility for the school.

The team couldn’t use the other major gym in West Maui — the county-owned Lahaina Civic Center that hosts the Maui Invitational college basketball tournament — while it undergoes an 11-month renovation to replace the gym floor and air conditioning system.

The project started in December and is expected to finish in early November, just in time for the 2025 Maui Invitational, which annually runs Monday through Wednesday of Thanksgiving week. The tournament was forced to move to Oʻahu in 2023 due to the ongoing fire recovery effort. It also relocated to Asheville, N.C., in 2020, and to Las Vegas in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Returning the high-profile event to West Maui in 2024 was a high priority for county officials to help spur tourism. And the tournament did its part, with Auburn University, currently ranked No. 1 in the country by the Associated Press, winning the invitational championship.

Fixing the gym floor at the Lahaina Civic Center will be a key component for the tournament going forward. Maui County Parks and Recreation Director Pat McCall said tournament organizer KemperSportsLive “did an incredible job” last year to get the floor to look good.

“And it did for the tournament,” he said. “But it was at its thinnest.”

The renovations also forced the county to move its weekly disaster recovery community update meetings to Lahaina Intermediate School.

In Central Maui, the county-owned War Memorial Gymnasium in Wailuku has been undergoing work since September 2023 to bring the facility up to hurricane shelter standards. It’s set to be completed in December, McCall said.

In addition to all four walls being replaced, the project includes a new enclosure for the names of the Maui County residents who died in wars and are memorialized at the entrance of the building. The renovation also includes installing new air conditioning, gym floor, bleachers, locker rooms and restrooms inside the building, instead of the old ones that were outside. There also will be a new office structure for the entire staff of the Maui County Parks and Recreation staff that is now in a temporary office space in Wailuku.

McCall said all of these upgrades were needed: “It was pretty bad.”

After the 28-month upgrade is completed, people who want to use War Memorial Gym will be in line to apply for permits to use the facility. Veteran volleyball coach Al Paschoal is excited for his Hawaiian Style Volleyball Club, which has 13 travel teams and 40 more youngsters who train with the club for a total of about 200 players.

“We would love to be able to use a facility like that,” Paschoal said from Baldwin’s Jon Garcia Gym where he was coaching the boys high school team. “I’m just dying to see what it’s going to look like.”

Paschoal said he has witnessed an explosion of youth sports, organized leagues and clubs on Maui since the return from the shutdown for COVID.

“The county has been doing a fantastic job juggling the resources that they do have,” he said.

Paschoal said he expects there will be high demand for use of the centrally located War Memorial Gym.

“I can guarantee the scheduling must be an absolute nightmare,” Paschoal said. 

McCall said the War Memorial Gym also could host University of Hawai‘i men’s and women’s volleyball and men’s and women’s basketball games for Maui fans to watch live. Lahaina Civic Center will also be a possibility for those types of events once it is completed, but the bottom line is getting the public users back in both gyms.

“Obviously, those UH events are the icing,” McCall said. “The cake, of course, is we want community use. We want our gyms to be open to youth leagues, adult leagues.”

At Lahainaluna, despite the damage to the school’s gym, the athletic teams were able to use the facility for the entire 2023-24 school year and the spring and winter seasons before the work began last week. The gym also is home to girls volleyball in the fall as well as boys and girls basketball and boys and girls wrestling in the winter. School assemblies also are held in the gym.

Lahainaluna principal Richard Carosso said the first evidence that the roof had been damaged by the fire came in November 2023, a few months after the August fire.

“We had a hard rain and we saw that the gym was leaking like crazy and it had never leaked before,” Carosso said last week.

Upon inspection of the roof, it was found the roof nails had popped out a couple of inches, caused by the high winds creating a vacuum inside the building.

Lahainaluna boys volleyball coach Marc Watasaki knows the season will be a challenge with all 12 Maui Interscholastic League matches on the road and practicing outdoors on an artificial turf football field. The volleyball boys have a net set up in the Olowalu-side end zone and share football field space with the school’s boys and girls track and field teams and baseball team.

“Maybe some different elements might make us a little bit scrappier,” Watasaki said.

Bienvenido Calipjo is a senior playing in his third year in the Lunas’ volleyball program. He was reflective last Wednesday in his final practice in the school gym.

“I’m kind of bummed that it’s our last day because for my senior night I wanted to play in the gym, just for the people in Lahaina to see me play my heart out,“ Calipjo said.

Justin Dela Cruz is a senior for the Lunas volleyball team who has been a standout leader since he was a freshman.

“I’ve been practicing in this gym my whole high school career and transitioning to the football field is like a weird experience because going to a field coming from a court is very different,” Dela Cruz said. “It’s a hard transition. … Since we’re faced with a challenge, I feel like we have to overcome it.”

Baldwin High School is working with the Lunas to share space in the Wailuku school’s gymnasium when opportunity arises. Watasaki said that may be between six and 10 times this season.

Lahainaluna boys basketball coach T.J. Rickard, who is also the executive director of Lokahi Athletics, a nonprofit youth sports organization based in West Maui, can’t wait for the reopening of the Lahaina Civic Center. 

He said since COVID and then the fire recovery efforts, during which the center was a resource center and location for weekly public meetings, it has been a challenge to get any use of the facility.

Rickard was guiding his five teams on two outdoor basketball courts at Lahainaluna last week, but even those courts may become inaccessible as they are possible storage space for work debris and supplies for the Lunas’ gym renovation.

“Just having somewhere where the kids can practice in Lahaina is a win because there’s very few facilities that we can practice in,” Rickard said. “As long as we can use the outdoor courts we’ll take it. … We need some joy back in Lahaina.”