SALT LAKE — Absence made the heart grow fonder for the Radford boys volleyball team. 

Two years since the Rams laid claim to the first league title in program history, they recaptured the feeling Wednesday night with a four-set win over Pearl City in the championship match of the OIA Division II tournament. 

The set scores were 25-21, 18-25, 25-22 and 25-14. 

Keahi Kaneakua put down a match-high 18 kills and came up with 11 digs to lead Radford (8-4), the No. 1 seed out of the Western Division, to its sixth straight win before a crowd of about 500 fans at Moanalua High School. 

The result was the culmination of a year's worth of sweat equity after a disappointing 3-8 record a season ago coming off the heels of a D2 league crown in 2023. 

"I think it's a lot of hard work that we've been doing since summer and honestly for the last four years to try and get them really to understand the game and so over time it's almost like the chemistry has been building over the years," Radford coach Melanie Toloumu said. 

Toloumu's squad is a veteran-laden one, for sure, with nine seniors on the roster, most of whom have been together for several years. 

"Six of them are four-year seniors and so when they're together for so long they really learn how each other works and we were able to get to a different level with regard to our defense — I feel like that's the name of our game is mostly defense. We try to work defense, but it's hard when you don't know who you're playing next to, so the fact that they've been playing together for so long really has helped them capitalize on the chemistry that they have in order to put up some good defense," Toloumu added. 

One of those seniors is Kaneakua, a three-year starter since he helped Pearl City win a D2 state championship as a freshman. Kanekua hit .395 (18 kills against three errors on 38 total swings) against his former team Wednesday.

Toloumu describes Kaneakua as another coach on the court, as well as a calming presence. 

"Keahi, I feel always works at another level. We knew that we weren't gonna be ahead the whole game — it's not like that, that's not how volleyball works — and so to have him on the court to keep calming them down and make sure that they know, ‘it's OK, it's a game of points so let's just go one point at a time,' he really does well at making sure that they know the strategy of the game that we're running and to enforce that on the court," Toloumu said. 

The Rams hit .260 as a team, while the Chargers hit. 159 for the match. 

The teams split the first two sets before they traded barbs in a tightly-contested third set where neither team led by more than four points. It featured seven ties, the last coming at 16-all.

Radford found some separation with a pair of kills by Bezeiah Togafau sandwiched around a back row attacker violation by the Chargers to take a 19-16 lead. However, scored the next two points to cut it to a one-point deficit. A few points later, a Pearl City attack error gave Radford set point, which Mark Kimo Villejo closed out with his kill out of the middle. 

Toloumu said that after her team took a two-sets-to-one lead, she made a slight tweak to her lineup in the hopes of getting some favorable matchups. 

"We pushed back our lineup by one, hoping that that would do something to trigger a better outcome in the end and so we had a better start in that fourth set," Toloumu said. 

The adjustment paid off right off the bat as her team opened set 4 on a 5-1 run, capped by an ace by Brayden Butay — one of 10 they tallied for the match. Later in the set, Kaniela Hao-Hose served up back-to-back aces to finish off a 5-0 run that stretched the Rams' lead to 16-7. 

Toloumu noted that over the course of the season her team devoted more of its practice time to fine-tuning its service game. 

"We've gone from maybe practicing our serves twice a week to practicing serves every single day," she said. "We needed the consistency in the serves (because) we can't give points away in that way and so we've gone from maybe getting three missed serves a set to two missed serves in a whole game and so they've really improved in that area."

Radford closed out set 4 with a 4-1 run that included another ace, this one by Micah Kalima-Keohohina that set-up championship point. Lehi Reyes's left-handed swipe at a ball set by Kalima-Keohohina got down in front of a Pearl City blocker and ignited the Rams' celebration. 

Villejo put down 11 kills and hit .588, while Kalima-Keohohina chalked up 24 assists, nine kills, six digs and two aces. Noa Toloumu dished out 24 assists and Butay posted a dozen digs in the win. 

Pearl City was led by the duo of Josiah Talamoa and Reven Otsuka, who combined for 29 kills. Talamoa accounted for 15 of those, along with 12 digs and five aces, while Otsuka notched 14 kills and hit .216. 

Toloumu said her team's defense keyed on slowing down the pair of prolific pin hitters. 

"We definitely scouted them. Josiah is an amazing play, so is Reven. We knew about both of them and we knew that they were gonna be powerhouse hitters and so we were going to have to play some really good defense in order to even the matchup," Toloumu stated. 

She pointed to the regular season meeting against the Chargers back on March 27 as a turning point for her team this year. Radford won the first two sets before Pearl City stormed back to take the next three. 

"It was a humbling moment, but I think one that was really needed by our team in order to grow from that. It doesn't matter how many sets you're in, you can still lose the game, so they really needed to feel that in order to work harder and I think they're fueled by the losses more so than the wins, so it was a good learning moment for them," Toloumu said. 

Kaneakua agreed that the defeat at the hands of the Chargers — part of a three-game losing streak the Rams endured in the middle of the regular season — indeed served as a motivating factor for them this time around. 

"Yeah, we definitely used that as our leverage, used it to get back and not lose," he said. 

Radford began the year 2-4 with losses to Division-I opponents Campbell, Mililani and Aiea in addition to the five-set heartbreaker to Pearl City, but will take a six-match winning streak into next week's state tournament. 

"We definitely had some ups and downs, but we learned how to adjust to it in practice and use it to our momentum," Kaneakua said. 

Pearl City (7-6), the West No. 2 seed, was seeking its first OIA crown since 2022 and its 14th overall.