All a sign-of-the-times necessity, perhaps, for a man who has been tasked with making the athletic program self-sufficient after back-to-back deficit years.

Slowly and meticulously — because changing the course of a 19-sport, $18-plus million athletic department at a bureaucracy-bound state institution can be like turning around an aircraft carrier — Frazier's vision for the state's only Division I-A athletic program is beginning to take shape.

In it, Frazier said he envisions a $20 million budget "within two to three years" that will allow UH to compete wherever it finds itself in the shifting collegiate landscape.

To support it, Frazier has aggressively sought revenue opportunities that will ask fans, through seat location pricing, pay-per-view and donations, to underwrite more of the bill.

He has guided through the Board of Regents a multi-year, three-tier expansion of the premium seating scheme, worked with the streamlined master booster organization, Ahahui Koa Anuenue, to enhance and coordinate fund-raising and lobbied donors to help pay for the milestone $800,016 contract of football coach June Jones. He has ended the marketing relationship with Leigh Steinberg to take it in-house and is reorganizing senior staff.

"Herman and I started at UH-Manoa on the same day and, I think, our first-year experiences have been similar in that he and I have both been trying to bring some rationality and organization to the way decisions are made at Manoa," said Chancellor Peter Englert, who is Frazier's supervisor.

Because the just-concluded fiscal year's budget and commitments made by the UH administration fell in the gap between the end of the term of the previous AD, Hugh Yoshida, and Frazier's arrival, the school has granted the athletic department a one-time $1 million loan to be repaid over three years.

Balancing a budget is something Frazier didn't have to do at Alabama-Birmingham, where he served for 20 months before coming to UH. There, he inherited and attempted to whittle a $7.5 million deficit that the administration had written checks to cover.

But with the July 1 beginning of the new fiscal year at UH, the burden of balancing the books while following President Evan Dobelle's reach-for-the-skies mandate for excellence is now squarely on Frazier and will test the foundation and strategies he has spent his first year painstakingly building.

Athletic department subordinates describe Frazier as "extremely well-organized" and "sharply focused," even to the point of being "a time management freak" with few moments in the day unplanned.

At times of controversy, such as following the Cincinnati football brawl and the NCAA volleyball investigation, he has seemed to retreat into "Herman the Hermit" seclusion.

Some of Frazier's acquaintances — athletic officials, business people and media — say they have often been frustrated in attempts to extricate the AD from his schedule. Jones, however, compares Frazier's fast-paced first year to his own whirlwind beginning in rebuilding the football program.

"He has done a great job in the community; he's been non-stop since he got there," Jones said. "That's kind of how it was for me when I first got there in 1999.

Said Englert: "He recognizes what needs to be done to run the athletic department as a manager and, at the same time, balance that with a keen sense of the needs of the public, our fans and supporters, and with his responsibility for student-athlete academic progress."

Before his first extended UH vacation next month and trip to Greece as Chef de Mission of the U.S. Olympic team for the 2004 Games, Frazier said he plans to hire an associate AD for external affairs (marketing and promotions), the final member of a four-person senior management team.

Frazier's Olympic duties — he is also a two-term USOC vice president — had been a point of controversy at Alabama-Birmingham.

"I know I'd been a little leery because of his reputation (detractors at UAB had nicknamed Frazier the "absentee AD" for his perceived detours to Olympic business), but he's been involved in almost all our meetings," said an official of a Mainland institution who asked not to be named because of relations with UH.

Englert said he, "admires the way Herman has been able to remain engaged nationally and internationally. He's tireless in his efforts to beat the drum for Manoa, but he's also been able to represent the state and the country in the global arena and that is a real plus for UH."

Western Athletic Conference commissioner Karl Benson said, "Herman has been a contributing member of the WAC and his previous experience in the Pac-10 and Conference USA has been beneficial as we look at the landscape."