HONOLULU — The way ‘Eleu Choy remembers it, there was a long silence in the car. The University Lab middle schooler then said what had been on his mind: He was thinking of enrolling at Farrington for the 9th grade.
“I swear he kind of swerved a bit,” Choy said of Barney Choy’s reaction.
To be sure, it was an unusual request for a quiet boy from the Waialae area. His father, an environmental compliance supervisor at HECO, graduated from Saint Louis, his mother from Kamehameha, and his older sister, Bailey, was enrolled at Iolani. He would need an exemption out of Kalani’s district to enroll at the Kalihi school, which had caught his attention for its engineering academy.
He shadowed Farrington’s principal, his former youth baseball coach Al Carganilla, around campus for a day, and it confirmed it was where he wanted to be.
“That kind of threw everyone a curveball,” Choy, the sixth-year Hawaii men’s volleyball libero, told Spectrum News with a laugh.
It is a somehow befitting origin story for an unlikely back-row mainstay for a powerhouse collegiate men’s volleyball program. There was little convention about Choy’s path to prominence for No. 3 Hawaii, for which he is in his second season as a starter.
Choy is a two-time Big West Defensive Player of the Week in 2025. On a roster stocked with top-level international talent, the 5-foot-7 local boy is as frequent a recipient of teammates’ credit as anyone.
“We count pretty much on him,” said opposite Kristian Titriyski, a freshman from Bulgaria who has emerged as an AVCA Player of the Year candidate.
After a recent match against fellow national power UC Irvine, Rainbow Warriors setter Tread Rosenthal, who came up in the U.S. national team program, saved his most effusive response for the play of Choy.
“He’s so good, and he's so fast, he's so deliberate with everything he does,” Rosenthal said. “We have so much trust in him just because of how hard he works, and we see it every day, and we see the level that he puts himself under, and sometimes he beats himself up a little too much for it.”
His agility was on display in Thursday night’s 25-19, 25-13, 29-27 sweep of No. 12 Ball State on Day 1 of the 29th Outrigger Invitational at the Stan Sheriff Center. He dug five balls, only narrowly missing extending his five-match streak of game-high digs honors for UH (18-1).
He got there by being his own harshest critic. On one hot shot that he couldn’t handle Thursday, he slapped the floor in frustration.
“My play affects their offense, so I want them to have the best opportunity to score points,” Choy explained. “That's why I'm tough with myself, because I'm not going to score points. So I want to focus all my energy on that one job I had, is to pass and put the ball up.”
UH takes on No. 19 Penn State on Friday night and follows with the marquee matchup against No. 5 USC on Saturday.
When he wasn’t on the floor early in his career, playing behind All-American Gage Worsley then All-Big West teamer Brett Sheward, head coach Charlie Wade would tell him to find a way to contribute — either academically, via bench morale or his work ethic.
No one, Choy resolved, would outdo him there.
During the offseason, he would get up at 5 a.m., head out for UH’s auxiliary Gym I and proceed to pass the ball to himself off the wall. He’d set a target of more than 1,000 passes per day, or 10,000 for the week.
If he hit the mark, then he would switch up to solo setting drills or begin blasting the ball off the wall and do his best to react to the carom.
Choy was loosely on the UH coaches’ radar as a young club player. By the end of his junior season at Farrington, when he was a setter for Govs coach Reagan Agena, then-UH assistant Josh Walker reached out to him with encouragement to keep working on his game.
He switched to outside hitter his senior year and helped the Govs get to the 2019 HHSAA Division I tournament. Three days before graduation, he was across the street from campus at KFC, ordering his favorite, chicken pot pie, when he got a call from Walker offering him a preferred walk-on spot.
He accepted immediately — he intended to enroll at UH with or without volleyball — but Walker told him he should call his parents.
Barney Choy, a longtime club volleyball coach who would train with his son at home with trash cans as setting targets, was surprised again.
“I was like, ‘Hey Dad, I got great news … I was offered a roster spot on the Hawaii men's volleyball team.’ He was like, ‘are you lying to me?’ I was like, ‘no, I’m serious.’”
Head coach Charlie Wade has consistently praised the example he sets. He is the link between the 2025 team’s title aspirations and the UH teams that reached four straight national finals from 2019 through 2023, including back-to-back national championships in 2021 and 2022.
“He’s always been a sparkplug,” Wade said this week. “You won’t find a harder worker. You can tell, he takes a lot of pride in everything he does and you can’t have too many guys like that on your team.”
Choy, who overlapped with his sister Bailey at UH for one year when she came home from Utah for her final year of volleyball, told himself when he came in that he didn’t care whether he saw court time.
That didn’t last as his lifelong competitive streak kicked in. By 2023, he was a partial scholarship player.
Choy learned a lot from two liberos with different styles. From Worsley, he studied his defensive moments and on-court demeanor. Sheward, a natural setter, was effective as a consistent passer.
“It taught me that you can't be that person (you watch), or you can't copy someone exactly,” Choy said. “You’ve got to learn from other people, and kind of implement it in your own style. And of course, be confident in yourself.”
Above all, he learned that being a good back-row player was about having presence.
He has it. Titriyski said the team gives him a wide swath of the middle court to cover on serve-receive.
At Farrington, where he took dual-curriculum courses for high school and college credits, Choy developed a reputation for showing up early and staying late, whether it was a team practice or an engineering academy course. He went on to graduate as a class valedictorian.
“When he came, he immediately made an impact with our teachers and our student body and impact to the point where, (it was), ‘man, who is this kid?’” said Carganilla, the principal, a former UH baseball player.
Aside from the engineering academy consideration — he has earned a bachelor’s in civil engineering at UH and is on the cusp of his master’s — Choy’s reasoning for attending Farrington was that it was a chance to come out of his shell in social settings, or “teach myself to speak up,” as he put it.
No regrets there.
“I mean, at first, your first thing comes to mind, Farrington, rugged, like, a lot of gang affiliation, whatever,” Choy said. But they’re just wonderful kids, yeah, low-income, but they all understand that everyone here is different, but we're just here to make it through high school and just go to our different goals.”
Choy joined leadership programs, which helped him find his voice, said Carganilla, who noticed the competitive streak from Choy when he was playing baseball at 5 or 6.
While his size deficit to his peers was not as pronounced as it is today, he was on the smaller side.
“Eleu, no matter who it was, he felt like he was as big or tall or good as anybody,” Carganilla said. “I think that’s what kind of propelled him.”
But he had a mean competitive streak; when his team lost, he didn’t handle it well; the coach spoke to him about it.
By high school, that had completely turned around.
“He took ownership of that, as far as being humble in victory and gracious in defeat,” Carganilla said. "That's a sign of maturity."
He pointed out that he has never seen Choy pout on the instances when UH is down in a match.
“The biggest thing I like about him was he could've easily quit the team when he wasn't playing his first two, three years, right?” Carganilla said. “But he just stuck it out and just competed every day at practice until he had his shot. And he never gave that starting position back.”
Even that required a twist of fate, as Choy was ready to join the workforce full time after the 2023 national title season. But his boss for his engineering internship at Fukunaga & Associates, Jon Muraoka, convinced him to stay, pointing out that he will have a lifetime for that.
Carganilla compares Choy favorably in terms of community stature and the pride he engenders, if not dimensions, to football alums like Vince Manuwai, Breiden Fehoko and Poncho Laloulu.
Choy has gone back to Farrington to speak to the student body and volleyball team. Just once, Carganilla would like to see him wearing a Govs throwback jersey during his UH warmups.
“I don't think we have had anybody like him. He's a generational guy at Farrington. You don't see those kind of kids that come around that often,” Carganilla said.
“He never forgets where he comes from, always. For us at Farrington, he entered to learn and went out to serve.”
Brian McInnis covers the state’s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii. He can be reached at brian.mcinnis@charter.com.