How jumper Napela Naihe navigated uncertain journey to Spokane Colleges, and is shifting into high gear for NWAC championships

He has been in Spokane maybe 10 months, and in that time, Napela Naihe has bought and sold so many used cars you’d expect him to show up in a cowboy hat on late-night TV commercials.

There was the Volvo wagon he drove cross country. An Oldsmobile Intrigue. An old Toyota Corolla and a Hyundai Accent. Most recently: a Subaru Impreza.

All makes, any model.

“If I can get a running car for under two grand, I can make it look good and fix it up right,” he said. “I’ll drive it for a few weeks or a month and have it listed the whole time, and it pays the rent – though it’s more a fun pastime than about trying to get money.”

Still, the car-flipping business is the most apt of metaphors in the life ride of Napela Naihe, who often in his 19 years on earth – not necessarily of his own doing – has seemed to be all journey and no destination.

Now it’s a little different. There’s a map for where he wants to go.

Up, generally speaking.

His day job at Spokane Colleges involves boosting his grade point average and sailing over crossbars, his final in the latter coming at the NWAC championships beginning Monday in Gresham, Oregon. He’ll have to overcome a heavy favorite in the high jump – Lane’s Kekoa Williams – but it’s certainly doable. Naihe himself has won eight of the 10 meets he’s competed in this season.

Not bad for someone who showed up on the track at Spokane Falls in flipflops.

“No spikes, no shoes,” said Kenny Keyes, the ex-Sasquatch jumper who coaches the event at his alma mater. “Coincidentally, we wear the same size – 13s – so I could loan him my spikes. Even with that, I could see right away he was special.”

But wait, this is fast-forwarding the journey a bit.

Somewhere in Naihe’s phone there are upwards of 50 emails sent to junior college track coaches throughout California. Maybe another dozen or so to their counterparts in Washington and Oregon. And easily double that total reaching out to four-year schools up and down the West Coast – a note of introduction, a modest resume, a hook in search of a nibble.

A polite plea for a chance.

“I must have sent out emails to 200 coaches,” Naihe said, “and I might have got five responses. I couldn’t blame them. My GPA was sub-par to say the least, and I hadn’t done much.”

Fifth place in the 2024 Missouri state meet. A best of 6 feet, 4¾ inches. A year off from school and track working in restaurants and in demolition.

But it will come as no surprise to anyone connected to the sport hereabouts that one of the few who pinged back was Larry Beatty, the Sasquatch coach with the Lady Liberty approach. Nor does it shock that simply by putting a nickel in the slot he hit the jackpot.

“I almost said no – if he was a Spokane kid, it would be one thing but I know coming from somewhere else it’s probably going to be tough,” Beatty said. “You have these kids who want to come and there’s always this one who you know is going to be the work of seven just getting them in.

“There’s a bunch of kids I said no to the first time who ended up being great here. They were persistent, and so was Napela.”

Naihe had spent only his senior year at Ozark High School – just 20 minutes up the road, coincidentally, from the Missouri town of Spokane. He’d played volleyball at Mira Loma High School in Sacramento before that, and as a child had bounced around with his five siblings from his native Hawaii to Houston. His parents, Kalipono and Christa, divorced when he was 10. He estimated that he’d attended 12 grade schools. After high school, he’d returned to Sacramento to live and work with a brother, did some “couch hopping for a bit” when it didn’t work out and finally returned to Hawaii to stay with an uncle.

Navigating the necessary paperwork too get him into school – and paying for it – seemed daunting, but Beatty said that Ronda Reineke of the college’s financial aid office discovered that Naihe fell under the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act. That bypassed the need for a parental FAFSA and set him on the road to Spokane.

When he hooked up with Keyes at the track and ran through some drills, he asked to take a crack at a crossbar – set at 6-5. He cleared it on his second try.

“This,” Keyes thought, “is going to be fun.”

He had no idea how much. In the season’s first meet, indoors at The Podium, Naihe cleared 6-9. He added a half-inch to that a month later. He hasn’t matched that again, but has been under 6-6 only once all spring – while no four-year jumper in the area has cleared 6-2. When Naihe was gifted a pair of new spikes, it brought tears to his eyes – validating his passion, his persistence and “this great opportunity I couldn’t have dreamed of.” He’s similarly proud of a GPA that’s now over 3.0.

And he’s proud of his inspiration – his father Kalipono, who died in his sleep from heart issues at age 49 when Naihe was a high school sophomore.

“I might have seen him maybe a few months from the time I was 10 because he lived back in Hawaii,” Naihe said. “I felt guilty for not having seen him for so long, and I felt guilty for my parents’ divorce as well. So I just try to celebrate his life. He wrote poetry, and reading that has helped me. Even now I see how much he taught me and things he was right about, and it makes me happy.”

It’s a different kind of happy than high bars and cool cars, like the ’94 Toyota 4Runner he currently drives. So when will it show up on Autotrader?

“Oh, I can’t, man – I got a rocking deal on it,” he said. “It’s my dream car.”

Dreams. You just can’t live out too many.