KANE'OHE — Castle High School is looking for sponges, giant ones, to soak up water ponding on its football field and posing a hazard to players.

Not any old material will do. The school wants old sofa cushions that resemble a dishwashing sponge and can be cut up for easy handling, said Sam Kakazu, 11th-grade counselor at the school.

The call for help appeared in the school bulletin in November and underscores the creativity needed to inexpensively resolve some of the smaller problems facing schools these days.

Kakazu, who oversees the school's athletic facilities, said while the school addresses bigger ponding problems by filling in holes with dirt or sand, smaller spots can be quickly mopped up with a sponge. The baseball program at Castle already uses the cushions, he said.

"At the University (of Hawai'i-Manoa, where he played baseball), we used to soak up spots on the field with these sofa cushions," Kakazu said, adding that it's the cheapest way to get rid of water. In some places at the college level, "they use gasoline to burn the field. The most extreme measure I heard of ... used a helicopter to dry the playing field."

Castle has been lucky there haven't been any heavy downpours, but it may be just a matter of time before that happens, he said.

Over the years, several volunteer groups, such as the Boy Scouts, Matson, Island Movers and Hawaiian Dredging, have pitched in to channel water away from the fields, Kakazu said. And a couple of years ago the campus got a new football field that cost more than $200,000, but the department wasn't able to install a proper drainage system that would have added $250,000 to the price tag, he said. As the years pass and wear and tear set in, problems are surfacing. Thus the call for cushions.

In the meantime, Kakazu said he's planning an experimental project to deal with drainage issues and hopes to work with volunteers in the next few months. They'll build a French drain to carry water away from the field. A French drain, he said, is essentially a ditch filled with gravel and a slit tube. The ends of the tube are fitted with filters and the whole thing is covered with more gravel.

"I've seen this work, and we have a group of guys volunteering who do that for a living," Kakazu said. The only problem, he added, is that this same group of people are tapped to solve other problems at other schools and he fears burning them out by overusing them.

The school could ask the state for the money to permanently fix the problem, but Kakazu said he's reluctant to ask because of the nosediving economy.

"Before we do that we want to try to get the all-purpose track," he said. "Until we get that, and as we're waiting, we want to make sure this generation of kids are playing on a safe field."