New faces, challenges for UH athletics
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist
For the first time in its history, the University of Hawai'i athletic administration looks like it will need a scorecard more than many of the teams it oversees.
When the school year opens next month to an athletic department under new management, most of the faces on the football and Wahine volleyball teams figure to be familiar while it is those who run the place that may need "My Name Is..." tags.
When associate athletic director Jim Donovan announced his resignation Saturday to take over the new Hawai'i Bowl, he joined athletic director Hugh Yoshida in the exit lane. Together, their departures mean the school will lose its top two athletic officials at the same time, a first in its 26-year Division I-A history.
Not since 1974, when the Nos. 2 and 3 people in the department, assistant AD Jack Bonham (plane crash) and business manager Gilbert Tom (heart attack) died within six months of each other, has UH faced as much or as sudden a turnover in the administrative ranks.
And, there is potential for more:
- Two assistant ADs were among 205 non-union administrators who received notices that would permit them to be terminated Dec. 16, should the new AD choose.
- Herman Frazier, who takes over as AD on Aug. 1, has said he will bring in at least one, and possibly more people, to fill out his team.
- At least three staff members, each with a quarter-century or more experience, are said to be considering retirement within the next 18 months.
The already announced moves underscore, in both personnel and atmosphere, the depth of change buffeting the department barely one year into President Evan Dobelle's tenure.
In many ways, this is a portion of the campus that has been little changed since joining the Western Athletic Conference in 1979, even as it has adjusted to tenures of three ADs and made the transition from a mom-and-pop operation to, at $16 million, one of the state's most visible businesses.
Despite a chronic shortage of resources and personnel, it is a place that has often operated as something of a family. A dysfunctional one at times, perhaps, but nevertheless one that pulled together commendably in times of tragedy and triumph.
That close-knit association over the years has been both its enduring strength and, at times, also its biggest flaw. The familiarity that gave it desirable durability and allowed it to ride out the rough spots sometimes also denied UH much needed flexibility to meet new and sudden challenges.
In reshaping athletics amid these comings and goings, it will be Frazier's task to somehow streamline it to better address the future without losing the spirit that has long held it together.
