By Dave Caldwell

PHILADELPHIA — August 31, 2009. Shane Victorino, the Phillies’ All-Star center fielder, is a long way from Maui, where he grew up, but he still tries his best to keep up with what is going on at home.

About a month ago, he said, he read a newspaper article online that hit him hard. The Hawaii High School Athletic Association, walloped by recent state budget cuts, had pleaded for financial help from private citizens and corporations. The fledgling fund-raising drive was called Save Our Sports, or S.O.S., and two banks, two foundations and the head of the association had pledged a total of $430,000.

Victorino, 28, called his father, Mike, a city councilman living in Wailuku, a town near the sugarcane fields that cover Maui’s arid central plain, and asked him more about the situation. Then Victorino, an Eagle Scout who was once a multisport star at St. Anthony High School on Maui, told the association’s chairman, Keith Amemiya, that he would send a check for $10,000.

At last count, officials had collected more than $700,000 of their $1.2 million goal, helping the association keep sports seasons going and avoid the prospect of forcing students to pay to play.

“It was almost like an obligation to do that,” Victorino said before a recent Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park. “It tells me something. In Hawaiian culture, everybody’s got each other’s back. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen anywhere else, but it is true in Hawaii. Family is No. 1.”

A year after the association narrowly avoided a cut in state financing, it watched the state government slash $2.4 million this summer of the $6.7 million it had budgeted for athletic programs covering about 25,000 students statewide.

Hawaii has no top-level professional sports teams and limited college offerings beyond the University of Hawaii, so high school sports carry greater significance for many. Residents identify themselves by high school alma mater. Everyone knows President Obama attended Punahou School in Honolulu.

But water, and the travel required to cross it, complicate matters for an organization overseeing statewide competition for 95 schools.

“On Lanai and Molokai, every game is really an away game,” Amemiya said in a telephone interview from his office in Honolulu. With a slight chuckle, he added, “You can’t drive there, or your bus will sink.”

Victorino said St. Anthony, a private school, could fly to most away games, but he knew he was lucky. The Maui Interscholastic League includes two high schools on Lanai and Molokai, and getting from those islands to Maui is expensive, complicated and time consuming.

Camie Kimball, the athletic director at Molokai High School, a public school with about 330 students in grades 9 through 12, said sports teams usually must ride a ferry to Maui. The ride takes about 1 hour 45 minutes each way, and Kimball said the round-trip fare ran from $80 to $105 per student.

When a team arrives in Lahaina, Maui, players wait until a coach catches a cab ride to fetch a bus kept nearby at Lahainaluna High School.

For a tournament in August on Oahu, the Molokai girls’ volleyball team slept at a nearby high school and cooked meals in the cafeteria.

“There’s not a whole lot to do on this island,” Kimball said in a telephone interview from her office on Molokai. “We don’t even have a movie theater anymore. We don’t have a whole lot of industry.”

Molokai’s unemployment rate topped 16 percent in July, and Kimball said several athletes at the high school would probably have had to drop out had they been required to pay fees. Amemiya and his wife, Bonny, donated $30,000 to the S.O.S. fund in July, including $15,000 for Molokai High School to cover interisland travel costs.

“When times are tough here, people pitch in, especially for sports — and this is gender-neutral,” said Jack Tsui, a former president at First Hawaiian Bank who is now with the Clarence T. C. Ching Foundation, which pledged $200,000 to the drive. “I’m really not overly surprised. I thought people in the state would help out.”

They have, Amemiya said, often with $20 checks. But Amemiya said tourists had contributed to the S.O.S. fund after learning about it. The drive ends in October, and Amemiya said he thought the goal would be met.

“This is a need-to-have,” Mufi Hannemann, the mayor of Honolulu, said in a telephone interview. “Sports is not a nice-to-have, it’s a need-to-have. The importance of the issue is sky-high. People here get it about the value of sports.”

For his part, Victorino said he could not imagine instituting a fee for sports. “You shouldn’t have to pay to play as a kid,” he said.

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