Business minds aid UH search

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist

Scan the list of members of the just-announced University of Hawai'i athletic director search advisory committee and one thing quickly jumps out at you:

This is a group familiar with business.

From the chairman, David McClain, who is dean of the College of Business, through the ranks, which include executives of several major corporations (First Hawaiian, Outrigger Hotels, Verizon, etc.) and others, this is a group that knows its assets.

And that is a particularly important distinction at this crucial juncture in the future of the UH athletic department.

As the school searches for an athletic director to follow the retiring Hugh Yoshida, the biggest concern confronting UH now and for the foreseeable future is finances. Operating the state's only Division IA athletic program, a 19-sport department, on a $16 million budget won't get it done for very long.

It might allow UH to tread water in the present-day Western Athletic Conference, but it won't come close to covering the marching orders UH President Evan Dobelle has given athletics. Or even allow UH to approximate what the sporting public has come to expect.

Not when you have to pay coaches a competitive wage. Not when there are 2,500 miles to the nearest opponent or to the backyard of at least half your recruits.

UH will ask a great deal of its new athletic director, somebody who must have a commitment to academics, a sense of place and a grasp of the changing landscape of college athletics. But ask athletic officials here or on the Mainland what are the key issues in UH's future and, time and again, they come back to finances and conference membership, in that order. They go hand in hand as pillars in UH's future.

To improve one you have to have the other. And without them ... well, that's a fate UH doesn't want to explore.

So, money — how to get more and how to stretch what there is — will be a defining factor in UH's future.

As such, you would hope the person who becomes the fourth Division IA athletic director in the school's history will be one with some established business background and the best plan.

That's where the strong business bent of this committee should come in handy. Who better to sort out the contenders from the pretenders? Who better to see the wisdom or weakness in each candidate's platform?

You never know about committees, of course. The last time around, when UH sought a successor to the late Stan Sheriff, one of the finalists that committee put forward was Judy Holland. Holland, an assistant athletic director at UCLA at the time, was head of the NCAA selection committee that passed over a 28-4 Wahine team.

But with so many members on this committee well-versed not only in business but this community, the first step in the process of hiring an athletic director is a hopeful one.