The Moanalua High School girls wrestling team has won five state titles in a row. That is the sort of sentence that usually ends a story. This week it begins one.
Sean Sakaida coached that team through four of those titles. He is now in federal custody, accused of producing child pornography with one of his wrestlers. Court records say he began dating the girl when she was in ninth grade.
Within a day of the FBI posting a tip form, two more possible victims came forward.
The morning after Sakaida’s arrest, the mother of his three children walked into Family Court with a handwritten petition for a protective order. She alleged that he abused her children, and she asked the court to keep him away for 20 years.
The courts have not yet ruled. But the public record is already heavy enough to ask: How did he get here?
The wrestlers were children. Their parents signed the permission slips and drove them to practice and trusted a man — and the school that hired him — to help form their daughters.
That formation is what a coach is for. A parent lends a child to a coach for a few hours a day so the child can learn to work hard, compete well, and get up off the mat.
Sakaida, by his own account, made himself available at all hours. In 2012, at Roosevelt High School, a parent accused him of kissing a 13-year-old wrestler and texting other girls as late as 3 a.m. He denied the kiss. He did not deny the texts. He told the Star-Advertiser he was only helping students with their problems, and that former students still called him “because he was always available.”
Every parent should hear alarm bells in that sentence. A 30-year-old man texting other people’s teenage daughters at 3 a.m. is not “available.” He is a threat. Teens have problems, and they should carry those problems to their parents. A coach who becomes the person they carry them to instead has not added something to a family. He has taken something from it. The best-friend coach is a type we have learned to admire. It is a type we should learn to resist.
The Department of Education investigated in 2012. But it never called the police. Sakaida was placed on leave. The next year Moanalua hired him. Moanalua’s athletic director has declined to say whether the school knew about the 2012 allegations.
That 2012 story ran in the Star-Advertiser and on Hawai‘i News Now, and anyone with a search engine could have found it in under a minute. If Moanalua knew, that is one kind of trouble. If Moanalua did not check, that is another.
Then Sakaida won: First a few individual champions, then four state titles in a row. In 2025 the school received a complaint that he was in a relationship with a 17-year-old wrestler. The school investigated. Again, no one called the police.
Sakaida was placed on leave, his contract lapsed, and his name went into a confidential registry. According to federal prosecutors, the relationship continued for months afterward. It took a private citizen tipping the FBI in January to bring in anyone with a badge.
Wrestling is a fine sport. It builds tough, hard-working people, because the mat does not lie. It teaches responsibility, because a wrestler who loses cannot blame a teammate.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to win, and nothing wrong with winning. But the desire to win is like fire: useful in the hearth, ruinous in the curtains.
We know what that desire looks like when it gets loose. Students who live in the weight room and skip the classroom. Teenagers taking steroids to gain an edge. Schools that hire a coach with a complaint already on file because his teams bring home hardware.
The desire to win at any cost is idolatry, pure and simple, and idols always want to be fed. In this case, it appears, girls were the offering.
Here is what happens next if nothing changes. The victims will rightly sue. The DOE will settle out of court to avoid the headlines. The settlement will be sealed, and the public will pay the bill without ever learning who knew what. Records requests will die under “pending litigation.” The criminal trial will produce details, and we will consume them the way we consume cold-case podcasts, and then we will forget.
We should not. Every detail that emerges should be read as a specification for reform. A school is not a police department. When a complaint involves a possible sex crime against a child, the school’s first call should be to the people whose job is investigating crimes.
That is already the law. Hawaiʻi makes every school employee a mandated reporter, required to report suspected abuse immediately to Child Welfare Services or the police. It’s not clear that the schools did. The Legislature should ask why, in public, before the settlements seal the answer.
A coaching hire should require a check of past complaints across the whole system, not just a clean criminal record. Parents should ask who is texting their daughter at midnight, and a coach should be dismissed if the answer is him.
Moanalua has a case filled with trophies. At what cost?
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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