How best to locate the right person to lead the athletic department of the most geographically remote college in the United States?
Two words: very carefully.
That would appear to be the position in which the University of Hawaii at Hilo finds itself today, 502 days since athletics director Dexter Irvin announced his resignation in November of 2013.
The department is concluding its second consecutive spring sports season without a director of athletics in place and the current interim director – former baseball program founder and coach Joey Estrella – is far removed from the hiring process and how far the search committee still has to go.
“People are working at it,” said Estrella, the second interim AD since Irvin’s resignation, “and it is going to take some time because of the situation we have here in Hilo.”
“The situation” is everything at UH-Hilo. You could make the case that there is no more difficult job in college athletics in terms of climbing competitive ladders of success while balancing all the priorities everyone has plus the elephant-in-the-room travel issues faced by no other school in America.
“I knew it was a challenge,” said Irvin, who resigned just before Thanksgiving of 2013 to take an equivalent job at Southern Nevada College, a junior college in Henderson, a northern suburb of Las Vegas. “It’s a tough job. I knew it was going to be a challenge when I took it, but eventually, I had to admit to myself that I couldn’t fix it.”
All outward indications suggested the school made a well-researched and insightful decision when they hired Irvin after he directed a challenge at Dixie State, taking it from a highly competitive junior college to membership in the Pacific West Conference.
Irvin built a junior college athletic department into a full-scale, four-year university and increased fund raising by more than $500,000. How could he not work out?
“It’s a really tough job,” Irving said. “Geographically, it is the most isolated college in the country; you can’t play a game in any sport without airline flights and costs being involved. At the end, we could simply not find another revenue source to pay the costs we needed to do what we wanted to do.”
The financial implications of playing full scale college athletics on the Big Island is a huge challenge known to everyone in athletics, top to bottom and it starts with travel.
“We have a $2.8 million (athletic department), budget,” Estrella said, “and 72 percent of it is travel. You won’t find too many places with that kind of structure to deal with.”
The challenge is something coaches face on a daily basis.
“We know who we are and where we are,” said baseball coach Kallen Miyataki, the former long time assistant coach of Estrella. “Bottom line? It’s a tough road here, we have issues others don’t have, but we are not and we will not make excuses; we are here because we want to be here. We will find a way.”
An eight-person search committee has whittled the list of candidates down to eight and “the review and screening of applicants will be in its final phase soon,” according to an email response from Jerry Chang, the school’s director of university relations.
When might they come to a decision?
“When they are done,” Chang said in a telephone interview. “It might be another couple of weeks, who knows, it could go on to December.”
“Whoever gets hired,” said Irvin while watching a Southern Nevada softball team play, “it’s a battle worthy fighting. The people in Hilo deserve competitive teams fighting for postseason success; the island deserves it, the institution deserves it.”
At the moment, the athletes and coaches at UH-Hilo deserve a dynamic leader at the top of the department, a visionary, a person who commands respect and can get things done.
Let’s hope the search committee’s time is being well-spent.
