08/31/2026
We remember Coach Skippa 🏈Mahalo for keeping his story alive Aloha Hawaii.
Farrington High School had never played a home football game. Not ONE. Not in its entire history.
Generations of Kalihi kids wore the maroon and white, and every single "home game" happened on somebody else's field. When the first one finally kicked off in 2017, under new lights bright enough to spill over the whole neighborhood, there was a name above it all. The man it belonged to had been gone three years.
Edward Thompson Diaz was born in Kalihi in February 1944. "I was born right in Kalihi," he said late in his life, "somewhere down in that Bannister Street area." Everyone called him Skippa. He swam for medals at Palama Settlement, then grew into a lineman so ferocious that Farrington fans gave him a second name: the Bull of Kalihi.
The Bull got out. All-conference defensive tackle at Oregon State. Professional football in Canada.
Then he came home. Not to glory. To Washington Intermediate.
Skippa Diaz spent the next three decades teaching and coaching at five Oahu public schools - Washington Intermediate, Waialua, Kalani, Mililani, and finally his alma mater, Farrington. As a head coach he won 108 games across 19 seasons. In 1990 he delivered the only OIA football championship in Farrington history, 15-7 over Waianae. And after every loss, his players heard the same five words: "The sun will rise tomorrow."
But the wins were never the point. At Farrington, the Bull of Kalihi ran a special education classroom. Norm Chow visited it and said you could tell the kids absolutely adored him. Beyond campus, he mentored at-risk kids all over the island - not just athletes, anybody who needed a big hand on the shoulder.
Then his family needed him more.
His wife Mary's parents were in their nineties, in Wisconsin, and her brother Butchie - Down syndrome, autism, a wheelchair - was about to be placed in a home. Mary went. Skippa stayed back; he had a good job as deputy director of Honolulu's parks. He lasted one month. "I cannot do this," he said. "I gotta be with my woman."
He walked away from the job and spent more than four years as a round-the-clock caregiver. Changing diapers. Making meals. Sitting outside at night with Butchie, just looking at the stars. He called him the apple of his eye. Asked later about trading his career for those years, the toughest man Kalihi ever produced said: "All the money in the world wouldn't make me want to do something other than what I did."
Cancer came for him in 2010. He fought it the way he fought everything, head on, for four years. A few minutes after midnight on August 30, 2014 - twelve years ago today - Skippa Diaz died at home. He was 70. Farrington still didn't have a home field.
He spent his whole life guarding people nobody else signed up for.
Every Kalihi family knows a Skippa story - somebody he coached, taught, benched, fed, or picked up off the ground and aimed somewhere better.
That September, hundreds packed Central Union Church to say goodbye. Then Farrington did something no one who saw it will forget. The entire student body walked out and lined Vance Drive as his ashes were driven slowly through campus. One last time through the school. Every kid on that road stood for him.
Three years later, on August 4, 2017, the Governors ran onto their own field for the first varsity home game Farrington had ever played. A sellout crowd. Lights washing over Kalihi. And above it all, in big letters: Edward "Skippa" Diaz Stadium.
He told his boys the sun would rise tomorrow. It did. It still does - every Friday night, over a field that carries his name, in the neighborhood that carried him first. Some coaches build winning teams. Skippa Diaz built people. The sun keeps rising over his name.
