Lānaʻi Flag Football League Seeks Coaches Ahead of Next Season
Erick Tabucbuc is looking for coaches.
As Lānaʻi Flag Football League prepares to open its next division, ages 8, 9 and 10, Erick is asking the community for more coaches and referees to help run it. More volunteers would let him step back from coaching a team himself and focus on overseeing the league as a whole.
"I want them to get that skill level and that competitive level before they get to high school," Erick said of why building up flag football on Lānaʻi matters to him.
Erick grew up in Nānākuli playing tackle football. When he came to Lānaʻi in 2016, he found a much different football environment from the one he knew growing up. Participation was low, with Erick remembering the high school program as operating on "bare bones" numbers. Soon after arriving, he worked with Natalie Ropa, Mary Lou and others to establish a youth flag football program through NFL Flag, which supplied jerseys for players. That program ran until the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down.
In the years since, flag football has grown into a much bigger sport than the one Erick remembered.
"It wasn't as big before, flag football, but now it is," Erick said. "Now it's a high school sport, it's a girls' sport. And it's not just high school now, it's college. It's an Olympic sport now too."
This year, Erick began organizing youth flag football again, this time under his own program, the Lānaʻi Flag Football League. The league has already run a group for ages 5 to 7 and another for ages 11 to 13.
The older division uses a draft to distribute players evenly among teams, with the season building to a championship. Winning players receive rings, and their team's name is added to a perpetual trophy, a running record that grows each year as new champions are added to it.
Much of what drives Erick to keep the program going is Lānaʻi itself. He has lived on the island for 10 years and calls it home, and several of the young adults he coached in the program's earlier years have come back to coach the current group of kids, including Kane Tubera and Roderick Noble.
Erick intentionally holds games at Dole Park, where families and people passing through town can see what's happening and stop to watch. During recent games, spectators brought chairs and gathered around the field as parents, coaches and players cheered from the sidelines.
“Hearing the cheers every time somebody runs a touchdown… I missed this,” Erick said.
Erick relies on a network of help to run the league, from longtime volunteers to local organizations that have supported it with insurance coverage, jerseys and the program's perpetual trophy.
Those interested in coaching, refereeing or helping with the Lānaʻi Flag Football League can contact Erick at etabucbuc@yahoo.com.