HONOLULU — Entering Wednesday, Punahou was well on its way to winning the Interscholastic League of Honolulu boys volleyball regular season without much on the way of argument from any of the other five teams in Division I.

That changed at Kamehameha’s Kekuhaupio Gym.

What You Need To Know

  • Eight-time defending state champion Punahou got a tough test from Kamehameha in Interscholastic League of Honolulu boys volleyball on Wednesday night at Kamehameha's gym before the Buffanblu escaped with a four-set victory

  • Three of the four sets went to extra points and Kamehameha staved off five match points before succumbing in the fourth set

  • The Buffanblu, at 9-0, clinched the ILH round robin regular season with one match still to play against Iolani before the ILH tournament

  • Kainoa Wade put down a match-high 22 kills for Kamehameha in the loss

The unbeaten Buffanblu were pushed farther than at any other point this season in having to outlast the host Warriors 27-25, 25-23, 24-26, 28-26 in front of a few hundred energetic partisans. Punahou dropped its first set of the season and had to come back from a late deficit in all three sets that it won.

“Outlast is a good word,” Punahou coach Rick Tune said to Spectrum News.

“For sure (that was the most they'd been tested),” he said. “Kamehameha’s a really good team. They have a lot of depth. When they’re in system, they have a lot of good options. Good, cagey hitters. That’s a really, really good team on the other side of the net.”

Just not quite good enough, despite a match-high 22 kills from Kainoa Wade, the son of University of Hawaii men’s volleyball coach Charlie Wade, who was among the spectators. Kamehameha fought off five match points before succumbing on the sixth.

The win clinched the double-round-robin ILH regular-season title for Punahou (9-0), the eight-time defending state champion that is looking to resume its dominance after a two-year pandemic hiatus.

Hitter Riley Haine led Punahou with 20 kills. Keau Thompson added 18 kills and a pair of aces and Aidan Tune, the son of the Buffanblu coach, had seven of his 16 kills in the first set.

It was a much more closely played match than the teams’ first meeting on March 16, a quick sweep. This time, the Warriors looked more like a No. 2 team in the state, per ScoringLive.com’s rankings, to the Buffanblu’s 1, as they celebrated big points with equal gusto.

First-year Kamehameha head coach Sava Agpoon noted all his main attackers hit above .300. Nerves were not a factor as they were in the first meeting, he said.

“I feel like (in) the first two sets, we had them,” Agpoon said. “Just small errors that happened at the end, that’s all. But we did close the gap on them from the last time we saw them. We played a lot more confident. That’s what we wanted to do.”

Kamehameha had set point in Set 1, 24-23, but an untimely service error let the Buffanblu off the hook and they went on to win it in extra points, with the decider a net violation on the Warriors during a joust.

The Warriors led 22-19 in Set 2, only to see the Buffanblu go on a 4-0 run, then end it on a Tune push shot for a kill on a free ball.

Kamehameha would not go away in Set 3, capitalizing on a no-touch out-of-bounds call on a crosscourt shot by Thompson that the Buffanblu vociferously objected to. Kamehameha followed with an ace while the visitors were still flustered to go up 21-18. Punahou tied it at 24, but Wade put down a kill and middle Dylan Oliva stuffed Tune to take the set.

Rick Tune told his team that experiencing the set setback could be a good thing.

“Definitely,” said Thompson, the high-flying lefty who is bound for Ball State on a volleyball scholarship in 2022-23. “We have a very powerful team. We have a lot of commits that are going up to college next year. So, it’s definitely humbling losing a set, because it just proves that Kamehameha deserved the win as much as we did.”

Set 4, like the others, was played very closely. Kamehameha would not go away down 23-20 and forced it into extra points for the third time in four sets.

Finally, Punahou got the point it needed to go home when Haine and Teke Bower blocked a ball near the right pin and Kamehameha was unable to recover.

“We did a lot of things well tonight,” Rick Tune said. “We passed the ball pretty good tonight, we sided out pretty good tonight, we hit the out of system ball pretty good tonight. We did not play great defense tonight at all. So we have a lot to work on, which is good, because we’re playing well on one side of the ball. The second side, once that comes around, that’ll be the full picture. And that’s our goal.”

Punahou hosts Iolani (6-3) on Friday in its last match before ILH tournament play begins. Kamehameha (6-3) has a match at Hawaii Baptist Academy (2-7) remaining.

The last school to deny Punahou a boys volleyball state championship was Kamehameha, in 2011. The Buffanblu most recently hoisted the trophy in 2019; there was no season in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic.

Brian McInnis covers the state's sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii.