As the 2017 Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s football All-State team release draws near, periodically we are going to ask a spreadsheet to generate a random number between 1947 and 2016.
Whichever year pops up, we will post that season’s all-star pages here.
This time we turn our attention to 1956, when Roosevelt ruled the ILH for the second straight season behind coach Edmund “Ticky” Vasconcellos and was rewarded with five players on the Honolulu Advertiser’s first team after an undefeated campaign.
Quarterback Mark Holbrook was joined in the backfield by halfbacks Mike Kelly and Milton Kam to befuddle opposing defenses. All three of them were named first-team ILH by both newspapers.
Kahuku won the ROIA with monsters like Robert Auelua, Wayne Hubble, Faliva Fely and Gerald Welch in the trenches, allowing quarterback Ronald Akiyama and running back James Tollefson to run free.
Tollefson and Waipahu’s Jerry Yokono were the only players to be unanimous selections by the Star-Bulletin.
Doubleclick the images to zoom in.
Subscribers to the Star-Advertiser can search full-page archives going back two years for free (pages are not available on the archive for 30 days after publication) at Newspapers.com. To access digitized newspapers from farther back — all the way to 1840 — subscriptions to staradvertiser.newspapers.com are available for $7.95 per month or $29.95 for six months.
Great to see some of the RED Raider OG’s from back in the day..Unke Bebe ” Robert Auelua”. was one of the great players who helped build the Kahuku football program…Many players would acknowledge what a Big impact he had on the kids in the community…We Thank You…Go Hard or Go Home….Go Big Red….
yes, Roosevelt did rule the ILH in the late 1970s. Nowadays, they nothing because all the ILH schools are recruiting their best athletes.
the above article mention that roosevelt won back to back OIA titles? or, is it suppose to be ILH titles?
You are correct, sir. Thanks for the heads up.