Linebacker Kawehi Sablan A Workhorse For The Knights
By Jack Danilewicz
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Del.icio.usLong before Kawehi Sablan arrived on the Castle campus, he’d already acquired a gift for working hard.
Indeed, while most of his contemporaries would be sound asleep at the hour 4 a.m. on a weekend, the 5-foot-11, 185-pound line-backer/running back is just beginning his work day.
“The way I look at it is that you get out of it what you put into it,” Sablan said of conditioning and weight training. “I try to put as much into it as I can. I’ve always been motivated to run. It’s something you have to do to play football. You have to out-work your opponents. It comes down to who wants it more.
“In the off-season, I just train,” added Sablan, noting that he doesn’t play any other sports. “I wake up early to run the beach or swim. Sometimes I’ll do both. There’s nobody on the beach then. It’s just me. I can concentrate and think about things.”
Lately, football has been his preoccupation. He is being recruited by Arizona, Utah and Hawaii among other Division I schools, but the team Sablan is most interested in at present is Castle. The Knights, who finished 3-5 last year overall (they were 3-3 in the OIA Red East Conference) are hoping to once again be a force in the league this fall. For that to happen, they’ll need another strong effort from their defense, beginning with a solid season from Sablan, who has started 13 games in his career to date. While he’ll also get his share of carries on offense, he is especially visible on the defensive side, and is the latest in a long list of great linebackers turned out by the school and defensive coordinator Harry Paaga.
“I like the way coach Harry coaches,” said Sablan, who is the youngest of five children born to Lyla and John Sablan.“He gets you ready mentally and physically to play. He brings out all aspects of your game.
“Linebackers are the craziest guys on the field,” he added. “I started playing when I was in fifth grade, and I loved it. There’s no other sport like football.You have to have a love for it to play it.”
Which brings him back to conditioning, a trademark of the Knights during the Nelson Maeda era. As part of their Monday workouts, they run a series of ten 240-yard sprints, with each player to complete each dash in under 45 seconds (50 for lineman). On Tuesdays, Sablan and his team-mates run sixteen 110-yard sprints before tapering off the rest of the week to ensure fresh legs on game-day.
“Coach (Maeda) always talks to us about how conditioning is one of the most important parts of the game. Our team has been working hard. We’ve put a lot into this season and now we’re ready.”
As a youth, Sablan played for the Kailua Mustangs Pop Warner program, where he found a mentor in his then-coach, Steve Heyer. Should he enter the coaching ranks himself someday, his work-ethic would be put to good use.
“He put that work ethic into me when I was young,” he said of Heyer. “He was kind of like a second dad to me. I still talk to him all the time. Sometimes I go and help him work with the (Pop Warner) kids. I like teaching kids - watching them learn - and seeing them do what they’ve been taught.”
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