Monday Morning MIL: Kamehameha Maui’s Gardanier leaps to unlikely state title in high jump

Cody Gardanier had never competed in track and field until his senior season at Kamehameha Schools Maui. On Friday, he will graduate as a state champion in the high jump.

Gardanier cleared 6 feet, 3 inches, to win the event at the Island Movers/HHSAA state track and field championships at Kealakehe High School on May 9. 

Now, he plans to add the high jump — and perhaps other events on the track and field docket — to his first sports love, basketball, when he enrolls at the University of Puget Sound, an NCAA Division III school in Tacoma, Wash., in the fall.

Gardanier surprised himself with his jumping prowess in a sport he decided to try in his final high school season. Two of his KS Maui volleyball teammates, ‘Īmaikalani Kramer and Zachary Pratt, also went out for track for the first time, and Gardanier thought it would be fun to join them and qualify for states to “get a little free trip before I graduate.”

“I was the only one to qualify for states, but doing it with them was a lot of fun,” Gardanier said. “I like the track meets. … It was my first year, so I was very surprised.”

The potential Gardanier displayed in the high jump is immense, especially considering he practiced the sport for only a few hours a week while also competing for the Warriors volleyball team, which had matches on Tuesdays and Thursdays while track meets were on Fridays and Saturdays.

“Right when school ended at 2:30, I would rush down to athletics and probably get there a little before 3 to the track,” Gardanier said. “Then from 3 to 4 o’clock, I would either do jumping stuff or running stuff on Mondays and maybe Wednesday. I didn’t have a whole lot of practice time for track.”

Kamehameha Maui track and field coach Rudy Huber sees a bright future for Gardanier in the sport. He was impressed with what he saw from Gardanier in early practices in February when the season began. Gardanier dabbled in some of the relays, and then the coaches thought he should give high jump a try because he was tall.

“And he was pretty athletic,” Huber said. “So, we kind of put him in there and tried him out at practice. And, he had good hip height and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, he could probably go six feet.”

Now, Huber says he sees a possible 7-foot jump in Gardanier’s future, which would put him in national championship contention at the NCAA Division III level. The current national leader at that level has a season best of 6-11.5. Huber added that Gardanier is extremely coachable.

“He’s definitely a sponge,” Huber said. “If he does high jump at Puget Sound, I would not be surprised if he goes 7 feet there.”

When Gardanier realized he was the last jumper going at the state meet, he smiled to himself. A thought he had early in the season had just come true: he was a state champion. The jumping style between basketball and volleyball and the high jump has one major difference — court sports is usually jumping off of two feet, while the high jump is leaping off of one foot.

“I definitely knew I had hops early on, but I never thought it would really convert to track because I’m a two-foot jumper in basketball,” he said. “So I wasn’t sure that it would transfer over, but I knew I was athletic and I knew I could make a showing and I was decently smart, I could learn pretty fast. But I definitely didn’t think that I’d just come out the gates and win the whole thing.”

On May 10, Gardanier’s teammate and another close friend, Nohi Casco, broke the state record in the pole vault with a leap of 15 feet, 4 inches. Casco was the last vaulter going after everyone else couldn’t clear higher than 13-10 — Gardanier had a message for his friend between vaults at that point.

“The first thing I said when he clinched the state championship was ‘you’re not done yet,’ ” Gardanier said. “When he set that record, the whole stadium exploded.”

A day earlier, it was Casco who was excited for the state title Gardanier won. The track season was the first time the pair were teammates — Gardanier did not play on the school’s state championship football team last fall and Casco was not able to join basketball or volleyball because he was busy with his hula halau, practicing for the Merrie Monarch competition that took place April 20-26 in Hilo.

“He’s one of the reasons why I went to track because we’ve been friends for a long while and I’ve been always trying to get him to play basketball or volleyball,” Gardanier said. “But it’s always been either he’s recovering from an injury or he’s doing Merrie Monarch.”

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Boys volleyball: Maui High makes state final four for first time in school history

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The Maui High School boys volleyball team that won its first MIL Division I title since 2001 advanced to the state final four for the first time in school history with a five-set win over James Campbell High School on May 8 at Moanalua High School gym.

The No. 4-seeded Sabers won the match 15-25, 25-21, 25-23, 22-25, 15-8 behind 16 kills from Zachary Prangnell, 15 kills from Samuel Cummings and 14 kills from Luke Prangnell — all three kill leaders are juniors. Five of the 10 players to take the court in the Sabers’ historic win are set to return in 2026.  

The next night the Sabers fell 25-19, 25-18, 25-19 to top-seeded Punahou, which won the state title on May 10 in four sets over Kamehameha Kapālama. Maui High finished fourth after a loss to Moanalua in the third-place match.

MIL Division II champion Seabury Hall also finished fourth in its bracket, after a quarterfinal win over Maryknoll and losses to Kapa‘a and Le Jardin.

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HHSAA Hall of Honor: Loree, Labuanan make list of 12 top senior athletes in state

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Tyler Loree of Seabury Hall and Mikah Labuanan of Kamehameha Schools Maui, both multi-state champions, are both among the 12-member HHSAA Hall of Honor class of 2025 that was announced Sunday.

Loree, who has signed with UCLA, won his second straight David Ishii/HHSAA state golf title May 2 at the Mauna Lani North Course. He is the first two-time state champion from the MIL, boy or girl, and only the second MIL boy to win a state golf title, joining William Coelho of Maui High (1988).

Labuanan is the first four-time state champion boy wrestler from the MIL, joining girls Nanea Estrella and Lalelei Mata‘afa, both of Lahainaluna, as four-time state champions from the league. Labuanan has committed to wrestle at Cal State Bakersfield.

The MIL pair are part of a class of 12 standout senior student-athletes who were selected by a 13-person committee of current and former sports reporters, athletic directors and coaches from around the state. The criteria is based mainly on athletic achievement, but character, sportsmanship, academic record and community service also were taken into consideration. The 12 inductees will be honored at a banquet on June 1 at the Sheraton Princess Ka‘iulani’s Ainahau Showroom. Each inductee also will receive a $2,000 scholarship.

“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 rob@hjinow.org.