Stop the ridiculous midnight prep football, especially on school nights

A high school football game started at 8:38 p.m. on Thursday. It ended right around midnight.

It’s bad enough when a game goes that late on a weekend night. It is simply unacceptable on a school night.

The game was at Aloha Stadium, and the students on the Farrington and Mililani football teams probably didn’t get to sleep before 2 a.m.

That’s not conducive to a productive next day at school.

No high school students should be at a school-sanctioned event that late, especially the night before a day of classes. It’s so obvious it is painful to have to report it.

I called Oahu Interscholastic Association executive director Ray Fujino on Friday to talk about what can be done to prevent this in the future.

We agree an obvious solution is to not have a junior varsity game before the varsity matchup. Play it on another day, or at a different venue. There is cost associated with this, but what price tag should we put on student welfare?

Fujino is accurate when he says JV games used to be played before varsity games with fewer problems of this nature. But now, both varsity and JV games tend to take more time because there are more clock-stopping passing plays at both levels.

The JV game went about 2 1/2 hours and the varsity took about 3 1/2, Fujino said.

“The JV game was going so well,” Fujino said. “I’m thinking ‘All right. It’s almost the end of the third quarter and it’s 7 p.m.’ But in the 4th quarter there were three or four touchdowns and the game ended after 8 p.m.”

The varsity game was scheduled to start at 8 (which is too late to begin with), but didn’t kickoff until more than a half hour later.

Fujino said it was Farrington’s homecoming game.

A long injury timeout added to the varsity game’s length. Also it was televised, but Fujino said he didn’t think that added to the length because the TV timeouts coincided with breaks in action on the field.

If it costs too much to play JV games on a different day, then perhaps there should be a time limit for them so the varsity games can start at a reasonable hour.

“Yeah, we’ve got to look at that,” Fujino said. “I don’t know. Cut the quarters? I don’t want to take away from the spirit of the game. The athletic directors are looking at it. Games in general are taking longer.

“We’ll figure something out,” Fujino said.

Something should have already been figured out. While there were several elements contributing to the late start and finish of the varsity game, ending at midnight is very preventable and can’t happen again — especially on a school night.