Monday Morning MIL: Gushiken, Seumalo looking forward to another football season after junior college court ruling

Kapena Gushiken and Uso Seumalo will both be back in major college football in 2025. 

The pair of 2020 Maui Interscholastic League graduates — Gushiken from Kamehameha Schools Maui and Seumalo from Moloka‘i — both thought their college eligibility clocks would expire at the end of the 2024 season until a court decision in December gave each of them one more chance to improve their wares for possible shots at the NFL.

The Seumalo family made the trek from Maunaloa, Moloka‘i, to Manhattan, Kansas, on Nov. 23, 2024 for the Kansas State University football game against Cincinnati. They were celebrating senior night for Uso Seumalo, the Wildcats’ standout defensive tackle who is the first from Moloka‘i to receive a football scholarship to a power conference school. Moloka‘i native Kimo von Oelhoffen played football at the University of Hawai‘i and Boise State in the early 1990s before a 14-year NFL career.

The Seumalo family will get another chance to celebrate senior night because Uso Seumalo will be back in Manhattan in the fall due to the Diego Pavia court ruling granting another year of NCAA eligibility to players who played in junior college. Seumalo played two seasons at Garden City (Kansas) Junior College before transferring to Kansas State prior to the 2022 season.

Seumalo went to Kansas in the fall of 2020, but the season was canceled due to COVID. He played his first season in the spring of 2021 at Garden City and was back at the same school for the regular fall 2021 season. 

Over the last two seasons Seumalo has emerged as a stellar defensive tackle for the Wildcats. He was “stoked” when he found out he would get another shot at college football to hone his skills in a state where he has really grown as a player — he competed in only his senior season for the Farmers, and six of the eight games were eight-player contests.

“I kind of had it in my mind that I would love to come back if I could, even before this (court ruling) happened,” Seumalo said. “I said, ‘if I had another year, I’d definitely take it to come back and try to just get better physically, fundamentally, all the other little stuff.’ And when it passed, it was like I got an answered prayer. And I was excited, man.”

Seumalo discussed it with the K-State coaches and it was a short conversation.

“And even the coaches were stoked about it as well,” he said. “So it was an easy decision and a very fast decision.”

Mike Tuiasosopo, a veteran coach with more 30 years of experience, will be in his seventh season at Kansas State coaching the interior defensive line in the fall.

“For him to be where he’s at, he’s working on his graduate degree now, get an opportunity to play another year of ball, man, wow,” Tuiasosopo said of Seumalo. “An amazing, amazing story, too, and the thing of it is (Moloka‘i head coach) Mike Kahale, he was very instrumental in helping Uso and obviously the support of his family.”

Tuiasosopo said Seumalo has had “an incredible journey” so far, and “there’s still a lot out there” for him to write his story.

Gushiken, a safety, stayed home in the fall of 2020 due to COVID and then played the 2021 and 2022 seasons at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Calif. He then played the 2023 and 2024 seasons at Washington State, where he started 16 times in the 25 games he played in Pullman, Wash. After the Pavia ruling, Gushiken transferred to the University of Mississippi and arrived there in January in time for spring practice., where he is one of 40 new players on the roster.

Gushiken shakes his head when contemplating his journey from Pukalani to Mission Viejo to Pullman and now Oxford, Miss., that has taken him from unrecruited by NCAA Division I schools out of high school to the Southeastern Conference, the perennial No. 1 college football conference in the nation. The first coach from Maui that Gushiken mentions as helping him along the way is David Kamalani.

“To be able to have an opportunity to play at the highest level possible in college is something that I’m just so excited for and grateful for,” Gushiken said on Thursday. “I just feel like I could have never predicted it. And I’m glad that a lot of like my childhood dreams are now starting to come true.”

Gushiken was third on the WSU team last season with 52 tackles, 3.5 tackles for loss and two interceptions. As a junior in 2023, he had an 88-yard interception return for a touchdown in a game against UCLA that made highlight shows all over the place.

“I know there’s a lot of people who are rooting for me, looking up to me,” Gushiken said. “And I just want to be that good example and represent my home well.”

Gushiken is set to graduate in December with a degree in multidisciplinary studies. He hopes the NFL is the next stop in his unusual football journey.

“I think about it every day,” Gushiken said of the NFL. “That has always been my all-time goal.”

Seumalo has similar thoughts. He was on the 2024 East-West Shrine Bowl watch list, the 2024 Polynesian College Football Player of the Year Award watch list, was a 2023 All-Big 12 Honorable Mention selection by the league’s coaches, and a 2023 First Team Academic All-Big 12.

As he developed as a player on the football field in Manhattan, he has gone from appearing for 87 defensive snaps in 2022 to 343 defensive snaps last season.

Seumalo said the NFL has “been a dream since I was a little kid.”

“That’s the plan, is to try and play at the next level any way I can,” he said.

Seumalo is grateful that his parents, Vaai and Naomi Seumalo, allowed him to play football for the first time as a Moloka‘i senior in 2019. Even though he was 6-foot-3 and 285 pounds, and an honorable mention all-state selection in basketball and volleyball for the Farmers, his parents hadn’t let him play football earlier because they worried he’d get hurt, but eventually Seumalo talked them into it.

“I never really thought I’d play football this long, honestly,” Seumalo said. “It was something that just started because I wanted to go play ball with my friends in high school. And somehow got an opportunity to keep playing.”

He has a bachelor’s degree in communications and is now working on a graduate degree in communications/social media marketing. He looks forward to another senior night with his family surrounding him before he moves on to a possible NFL career.

“Without my island, the people behind me, my family, my friends, my coaches in high school, I wouldn’t be here,” Seumalo said. “All of those people played a huge part in my life to get me to where I’m at today.

“And I’m grateful and thankful for them each and every day. And I’m trying to do what I can as a product of Moloka‘i, Hawaiʻi and just the state of Hawaiʻi in general to make them proud. And just to show that people from small places can make it, too.”

“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.