Incoming chancellor likes UH challenge
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist
Seventeen years ago, while a professor of nuclear chemistry at San Jose State, Peter Englert was an honorary coach of the men's basketball team and sat on the bench at some home games.
That, Englert said he was convinced at the time, would be as close as he would ever get to involvement of note in NCAA sports. That, he was sure, would be the last intersection of his burgeoning career and intercollegiate athletics.
Indeed, he would have more to do with Mars — as a member of several NASA space teams — and Antarctica — as a participant in research expeditions — than the sometimes out-of-this-world arena of intercollegiate athletics.
But that has suddenly changed as the former pro vice chancellor at Victoria University in New Zealand prepares to become chancellor of the University of Hawai'i's Manoa campus. Come Aug. 1, Englert's heaping plate of responsibilities in Manoa will include overseeing the 19-sport, $16 million athletic department and being UH's voting member on the Western Athletic Conference Board of Directors.
He and UH's other new man on campus, athletic director-designate Herman Frazier, will be charged with charting and guiding the future of the state's only Division I-A athletic program.
For Englert, a man well versed in performing accelerator-based experiments in support of application of nuclear techniques in planetary and terrestrial remote sensing, the world of redshirts, initial eligibility standards and exempted contests is a wide, new frontier.
NCAA-speak is but the latest tongue to be attempted by someone already at home in Maori, German and Spanish.
They are challenges the 52-year old Englert apparently relishes as much as the triathlons he used to compete in and coach while at the University of Cologne. "(Being responsible for athletics) wasn't listed in the position description when I applied (at UH)," Englert said. "But I actually sort of hoped that I would be responsible for it. When I finally learned I will be overseeing athletics after all, I greeted that with some excitement, actually. Athletics is one of my passions."
It did not take long to learn that the state he will now call home feels the same way about UH. "When I started to look at (UH) from the prospective of a candidate for the chancellor's office, I found out how important athletics is to the public image. When I started to do a Web search, the majority of the articles were about the success of the sports teams," Englert said.
Beginning next month, UH's destiny entrusted to new hands, they become his teams, too.
