LAHAINA — For three years, Lahainaluna High’s head football coach Dean Rickard has witnessed the toll and hardships his players and coaches have experienced as they and their families recover from the 2023 wildfire that destroyed much of Lahaina.

He has listened to them talk about having to move again, about how their parents are considering leaving for the Mainland while the town is slowly rebuilt. He’s seen the shifts in their moods and the loss of interest in things that used to be exciting.

“It’s unique to us because there’s no other football team that is experiencing that right now,” Rickard said.

About 2,500 miles away on the Mainland in a town called Paradise, the players on the local high school’s football team are some of the few people who know exactly what Lahainaluna players are going through. In 2018, many of the Paradise players were in elementary school when the Camp Fire destroyed their small, rural community in northern California.

At 6 p.m. Saturday, the Lunas and Bobcats will meet at Lahainaluna’s Sue D. Cooley Stadium in a game that’s being touted as the “Unity Bowl.”

The game will showcase the hope and resilience of two close-knit towns recovering from unimaginable loss.

“It’s going to be more than just a football game for sure, no doubt,” said Rickard, who lost four family members in the fire. “It’s going to be an emotional event. But I think it’s pretty historic in the fact that we have two communities, and both of us are connected by tragedy. 

“But at the same time, we’re resilient communities and both of our communities are determined to rebuild.”

Before the August 2023 Lahaina wildfire that killed at least 102 people, the November 2018 Camp Fire that claimed the lives of 85 was the country’s deadliest in the past century. The Camp Fire took 17 days to fully contain, burning more than 153,000 acres, destroying over 18,800 structures and causing $16.65 billion in damage to a town of about 26,000 people. 

Like the Paradise fire, the Lahaina fire also was sparked by downed electrical equipment, burning over 2,170 acres and destroying over 2,200 structures in a town of about 12,700 people as of the 2020 census. Damages were initially estimated at $5.5 billion but are now expected to reach nearly $7 billion.

On Lahainaluna’s football team, 10 of the team’s 18 coaches, including Rickard, lost their homes, as did more than half of the players on the 2023 roster. 

The Lunas’ first football game after the fire, a 42-0 victory over Baldwin High School on Sept. 30, 2023, took place in front of emotional fans in a jam-packed War Memorial Stadium. They became a visible symbol of hope and recovery. They were featured in an NFL Films documentary and served as honorary captains for the Super Bowl LVIII coin toss in Las Vegas in February 2024.

Football also brought the town of Paradise together after the Camp Fire. Christy Voigt, co-principal at Paradise High School, said their first event back in town after a year away from campus was a Bobcats football game. More than 1,000 people attended.

“People came from everywhere,” Voigt said. “We always knew that football was such a big part of our community, but it really wasn’t until that game that it brought everyone together. … Lahaina has that same passion for football.”

In 2024, the two schools started talking about putting a game together. Lahainaluna Athletic Director Jonathan Conrad said that Doug Bennett, longtime coach and athletic director at Punahou School on O‘ahu, was a fraternity mate of Jerry Cleek, the athletic director at Paradise. They kickstarted talks that soon grew to include Conrad and former Hawai‘i High School Athletic Association executive director Keith Amemiya. 

After the game on Saturday, the two teams will also have a chance to get together at the hotel where the Paradise team is staying. Conrad thinks it will be helpful for the Lunas to meet kids from a town that’s five years ahead in their recovery.

“These kids were a little bit younger than our kids before the fire happened,” Conrad said. “So just to realize that they’re going to be OK. It’s a matter of resilience and a matter of coming together. And sometimes there’s no better way to help the healing process than to be with like-minded people who have gone through similar experiences.”

Conrad has a patch of grass behind his office that he waters daily, and the vegetation has grown alongside the town — a concrete slab here, a house coming up there, the banyan tree regrowing.

Lahainaluna’s football field has one of the best views of the town, and on water breaks at practice, the Lunas have also watched the recovery unfold. Since the fire, 601 homes have been rebuilt in Lahaina and Kula, with 410 more under construction.

“Seeing all the houses from the top here and the process we’ve made so far motivates all of us,” said senior right guard Tua Olakauatu, who lost his home in the fire. “We try more and more harder in practice. I can see it too, in all my other teammates.”

Olakauatu, who evacuated from his home with only the clothes on his back, recently moved back in to his rebuilt home with his parents and four siblings in January.

“Finally got a home. It feels amazing,” he said. “Life is slowly getting better.”

Olakauatu said football has meant a lot to him these last three years, helping him “keep my mind off the fire … because I was going through a lot.”

He said it’s still hard to talk about the fire, and admits he’s not sure how the Lahainaluna and Paradise players will feel about sharing their stories. Still, he expects to be “making a lot of friends” this weekend.

“We’ve both been through the same thing, you know?” he said. “And there’s no difference, but we’re all going to come out and play hard, especially because we both lost a lot of stuff.”

His teammate Brayden Valencia, a senior defensive end and fullback, also said sports has offered a mental reprieve from the fire, which destroyed his friends’ homes and forced his relatives to move to Vegas.

“Football has just been an escape for me, and I’ve just been able to just clear all my emotions and just forget about it for a couple hours,” Valencia said.

Valencia was looking forward to his first day as a freshman at Lahainaluna when the fire began not far from his home. With the flames spreading and traffic piling up, neighbors cut open a gate near his home so they could evacuate. 

Valencia didn’t know his home had survived until he saw it later on satellite imagery. 

The way the neighborhood came together that day still resonates, inspiring him to be there for his community and his teammates.

“I’m just super proud of the progress we’re making,” he said. “It’s a slow process, but I’m just super excited and proud of our community coming back.”

He said he’s “excited to create a bond with the other kids” from Paradise and learn about what the recovery has been like for them.

Paradise, whose population dropped below 5,000 two years after the fire, is now back to just over 10,000, according to 2025 U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Voigt said the town is shifting from a retirement community to a magnet for young families who are drawn to the new schools and the affordable homes. 

Enrollment at Paradise High School, which was just under 1,000 at the time of the fire, is now at 560 and “slowly growing every year,” Voigt said.

Voigt, who lost her home in the fire, spent three years living with in a trailer on her property. It turned out to be “an amazing healing time for me because it was simple” — all she had to focus on was taking care of the trailer and her two kids. They moved into their rebuilt home four years ago. 

Voigt said the message she would share with Lahaina residents is to keep fighting.

“This is your home, and it is exhausting, but if you just keep showing up every day and fighting for your community, it comes back, and it will make you stronger,” she said. 

Paradise’s head football coach Kevin Sutherland and his wife were one of the young couples who moved to the area after the fire. He grew up in a small mountain town about two hours away from Paradise and returned to California from Texas in 2025.

Sutherland says football helps the kids take a break from their normal lives, find structure and learn life lessons. 

“They work incredibly hard, and they’re strong kids,” he said. “Regardless of what happens with the fire, they’re putting their all into this football program, academics and being good people.”

Sutherland said the Paradise-Lahainaluna game is “an incredible once-in-a-lifetime experience.” What they went through is “kind of unspoken between both towns and both schools.” On Friday at practice, one of the parents wore a shirt with the outline of Maui and California under the slogan “from one Paradise to another.”

Jacob Boykin, a senior outside and middle linebacker for Paradise, was in fourth grade when the fire burned down his home.

Like Lahaina residents in 2023, Boykin remembers the smoke and the sound of propane tanks blowing up. Phone service cut out, and he had no idea whether his dad had made it out safely until 5 a.m. the next day.

For a week afterwards, “I just remember never wanting to leave his side ever again,” Boykin said.

Boykin, who lived in a trailer with his family until they bought a modular home in 2020, says he got through the trauma of the fire thanks to the strength of his mom — who has joined him on Maui for their first trip to the islands — and the joy of sports. He remembers the sold-out stadium that watched Paradise play its first home game after the fire and how much it meant to have activities that united him and his friends. 

That’s why the game against Lahainaluna will be extra special. 

“It’s definitely going to be a deeper sense of connection that we’re going to be playing for, instead of just like when we play our regular hometown teams,” Boykin said.

Joshua Einhaus, a senior right guard on offense and outside linebacker on defense, said it’s an “incredibly awesome” opportunity to play Lahainaluna after what they’ve all been through.

Einhaus doesn’t have many memories before the day of the fire, which was “terrifying” because he was separated from his parents, who were working in nearby Chico.

The flames stopped a mile and a half from his home, and Einhaus said it’s been strange growing up in a place where untouched homes sat next to burned-down blocks and the husks of cars and melted fences lent the town “an apocalyptic feel.”

As he watches his own town recover, Einhaus said he wants Lahaina to know that “it gets much better.”

“You’ve gotta stick with it,” he said. “Some things are out of your hands, you know? That’s the big man up top. But it gets better.”

After practice on Friday, Paradise’s teachers association presented the Hawai‘i State Teachers Association with a $4,288 check out of their own Camp Fire fund, and Paradise’s student leadership gave Lahainaluna a check for about $1,200.