Student athletes and nearly 2,000 fans gathered on the Lahainaluna High School field for a historic football game. But playing California's Paradise High School was much more than a game — it was all about healing. Both schools experienced wildfires that destroyed their towns.
“I think it really helped us to heal and showed us that it's going to be okay and communities can get better and can be resilient. And I think it did a lot for us as a school and for us as a community,” Lahainaluna Principal Richard Carosso said in a state Department of Education interview.
He said last weekend's playoff brought up a lot of emotion from the 2023 Lahaina wildfire that claimed more than 100 lives.
Five years earlier, in Paradise, California, the Camp Fire destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 85 people. At that time, in 2018, it was the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.
Dubbed the Unity Bowl, last weekend's game was more than a year in the making. It began with conversations between the athletic directors at Paradise High School, Lahainaluna High School and Punahou School, according to the DOE. They envisioned the event as a bridge between the two tragedies and the communities they impacted. Paradise students fundraised to make the trip.
“We realized that football and sports and community heals,” said Christy Voigt, co-principal of Paradise High School. “And so that's really what this football game is about — is bringing these students and athletes together, and learning from each other, and sharing hope, and sharing stories, and making friends for life.”
The game marked the Lunas' first win of the season, 27-21 over the Paradise Bobcats.
But it wasn't the score that mattered most.
“Ours [tragedy] more recent than theirs, but I think that just having unity, and being able to, after the game, share stories with each other, and how we got through it, and kind of just representing our town,” Lahainaluna team captain Ma‘a Tevaga told the DOE. “It's a really, really big thing.”
Tevaga was one day away from starting his freshman year of high school in 2023 when the wildfire burned his home. His family relocated to Utah, but now he's back to finish his high school football career where his dad also played.
“Man, the biggest thing that I think we can get from this is kōkua aku, kōkua mai,” he said. “It's an old Hawaiian saying that says ‘We help you, you help us, and you know, we can grow together.’”
Carosso, the principal of Lahainaluna, said the Unity Bowl was also a chance to look ahead on the road to recovery from a community that’s walked the journey.
“I know a lot of us want it to be over and better tomorrow, and it's not going to be,” he said. “And I think Paradise has helped show us that that's OK. That if you stay together as a community, you keep fighting, you keep trying to do better every day, that it does get better.”
Paradise students volunteered during their Maui visit and joined the Lunas for dinner and a lū‘au.
The teams said they're making plans for Paradise High to host Lahainaluna in California for a future Unity Bowl game.
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