Donovan has what it takes to lead
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
The agents for then-San Diego Chargers coach June Jones were on the speaker phone in the one room and the budget data, expense tables and income projections, were mapped out in detail in the other.
For more than six hours, well into the night, the crunching and re-crunching of numbers went on as University of Hawai'i officials tried to find a creative way to land a new football coach in 1998.
"Can you get it done?" Jim Donovan, the associate athletic director and chief financial officer, was asked during a brief recess.
"Got to!" came back the resolute reply.
For 21 years spent on the Manoa campus, from his first three-point stance as a UH offensive lineman through six years ago when he became the No. 2 in charge, there has been a lot of "got to!" and vision in Donovan.
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They have propelled him along the career path — graduate assistant football coach, Rainbow Stadium manager, a master's degree in business administration, marketing director and assistant AD — to associate AD.
Jim Donovan has spent 21 years at Manoa.
In the process, Donovan and the department he has dedicated half his life to have grown together by leaps and bounds, celebrating perhaps the best all-around year of performance in UH history and earning a Top 20 ranking in U.S. News & World Report.
It is, at $16 million a year, the state's most visible small business and Donovan has had both a contributing hand and an educational ringside seat in the administration of two athletic directors, Stan Sheriff and Hugh Yoshida.
Donovan's come to know the lay of the athletic, political and financial landscape in the state in ways that might take someone else several years and much trial and error. He's developed a wide vision that takes in the hopes and limitations of an institution of higher learning separated by 2,500 miles from its nearest competition.
And through it all, he has developed considerable contacts with other schools and some of the movers and shakers UH will have to deal with in securing its future. Ties like the ones that helped bring Brigham Young and USC back on the schedules.
A delegation from UH spent the weekend in Dallas interviewing finalists for the next athletic director. Hopefully, they have found that perfect somebody whose experience, vision and personality made them look at one another and declare "this is the one."
But if they didn't then the next trip should be the short one, straight to the lower campus.
Where there is someone who has the "got to!" to lead UH.
