Inside The Huskies

After Dry Run of Local QBs, Huskies Pursue Young Tacoma Ace

Sione Kaho, just a sophomore at Lincoln High, has a UW visit scheduled in a few weeks.

Dan Raley

Sione Kaho has had two highly productive quarterback seasons at Lincoln High, with yet two more to play.
Sione Kaho has had two highly productive quarterback seasons at Lincoln High, with yet two more to play. / Kaho

The local quarterback.

For University of Washington football, this used to be a staple.

Lately, it's become a lost art.

After winning a national championship with Billy Joe Hobert, and providing a flurry of Huards and supplying a first-round NFL draft pick in Jake Locker, the UW has had to literally scramble to find an outside signal-caller to run things in Montlake.

This year's designated starting Husky QB comes from Arizona. Last year's guy was from Mississippi. The year before that, it was the prolific Michael Penix Jr. from Florida.

The state of Washington once could be counted on to produce a UW quarterback worthy of at least an NFL draft pick, with names such as Hugh Millen, Steve Pelluer and Jacob Eason lumped with the aforementioned players.

In Tacoma, the position appears to be making a comeback geographically with the emergence of Sione Kaho, who's had a pair of sterling seasons for Lincoln High School -- which once produced an NFL-bound quarterback in Jon Kitna, who had to go through Central Washington University to get there.

The 6-foot-2, 205-pound Kaho, who recently toured UCLA and has visits to the UW and BYU lined up, accoding to 247Sports, is a 2027 recruit who comes off a pair of sterling seasons at Lincoln in which he's collectively thrown for 4,488 yards and 35 touchdowns.

He'll take an unofficial tour of Montlake on April 5 in and around all of the camps he hopes to attend.

If his last name sounds familiar, Kaho's older brother, Ale, was committed to the UW in 2018 when the family lived in Reno, Nevada, showed up for summer football initiation and bailed on the Huskies shortly before the season began, drawing a release from coach Chris Petersen.

Ale Kaho immediately transferred to Alabama where he largely was a special-teams player for three seasons, and then on to UCLA, where he started five times over four seasons, basically sitting out nearly all of 2022 and 2023.

After seven years in college football, he used up all of his eligibility last fall after collectively appearing in 60 games. He'll probably always wonder if walking away from the UW was the right move for his career.

Now here comes his younger brother Sione, living and playing just 30 miles down the road.

As a freshman, he completed 162 of 235 passes for 2,296 yards and 18 scores, with 7 interceptions, while helping Lincoln to a 7-3 season and the playoffs.

This past season, Kaho quarterbacked a 9-3 Lincoln team headed to the postseason and connected on 172 passes in 277 attempts for 17 TDs, again with 7 interceptions.

Taking stock, the Huskies have Arizona-produced Demond Williams Jr. available at QB for multiple seasons, a pair of freshman in the 2025 class on campus in California's Dash Beierly and Hawaii's Kini McMillan, and are pressing hard to sign Brady Smigiel from SoCal for their 2026 class.

Kaho would fit right in at the tail of all that collected or pursued quarterback talent -- with the Huskies needing at least one scholarship guy a year -- and provide a local face and arm.

To get the latest UW football and basketball news, go to si.com/college/washington

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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