Punahou volleyball team sweeps Mililani, advances to Division I finals

Cameron Porter drilled 18 kills and Tanoa Scanlan pounded 15 as top-seeded Punahou swept Mililani 25-22, 25-17, 25-21 on Thursday at Kekuhaupio Gymnasium.

Punahou (21-4 overall) advanced to the Division I final of the New City Nissan/HHSAA Boys Volleyball State Championships. The Buffanblu, ranked 22nd nationally (MaxPreps) have won 12 matches in a row since losing to Bishop’s (La Jolla, Calif.) on April 11.

They will play Moanalua at 7 p.m. in BYU-Hawaii’s Cannon Activities Center.

“The court is bouncy,” said Scanlan, a 6-foot-6 junior. “I remember playing basketball there and you definitely get up more.”

He hit .344 and tallied seven digs, while Porter finished at .455 despite a resilient Mililani defense. William Niethammer had a team-high 10 digs. Noah Usher and Seizo Sexton chipped in five kills each.

Zyrus Alailima led OIA runner-up Mililani (18-6) with 10 kills. Kaito Duranceau had eight kills, and Moises Murillo and Seth Kimura (nine digs) tallied five each. Isaiah Holeso dished 28 assists.

“Mililani competes. They’ve got a lot of volleyball players over there. They play together as a team. They’re unselfish. They’re well coached. They received serves well, pretty much all night,” Punahou coach Rick Tune said.

The Buffanblu never quite shook off the Trojans despite the sweep. Tune wasn’t exactly disappointed, but he was not satisfied either.

“I don’t know how I feel yet. Honestly, I don’t think we executed our game plan super well. We had stretches of doing it, but we didn’t do it for a full match and you know what, maybe the guys did their best today. It’s not like you can’t expect them to do it at a super high level every single night. I believe they were trying hard. We executed at an OK level.”

Porter was the game breaker, a missile from the left, right and back row. Wherever he and his teammates were, setter Nalu Akana was perfectly on point. Akana finished with 42 assists and three kills, adding two aces, three digs and one block. The calm leadership of seniors like Porter and Nahua Lloyd set the tone after a rocky start.

“I think we kind of were too energetic. We had some big swings, but we weren’t taking care of little things,” Porter said. “We just needed to cool off. Mililani is a great team. We wanted to take a lot of line, and we started to do a little better. We had serving targets and I have to keep my serve more high percentage instead of trying to smoke it every time.”

The Trojans did not lack for grit.

“I like that we showed up. We’re all sore. Couple of our kids are sick, but you’ve got to show up and you’ve got to believe it,” Mililani coach Gabriel Maunupau said. “A big thing for me was fighting for every point no matter what the outcome was, and I think we did a good job. Unfortunately, in that first set we couldn’t get a sideout with the double sub. We went to a 5-1 and stabilized. The strategy was there. The execution of a couple of players, with a youthful group like this, sometimes doesn’t happen. We forced them to do some things that we wanted, but we weren’t doing a good enough job getting balls up to score a natural point.”