A year ago this past weekend, a vent opened on the northeast side of Pu’u’ O’o that sent lava foot-by-foot toward Pahoa and felt a little like a slow motion disaster movie.
A year ago this past weekend, a vent opened on the northeast side of Pu’u’ O’o that sent lava foot-by-foot toward Pahoa and felt a little like a slow motion disaster movie.
Six months prior to that, the University of Hawaii-Hilo announced the search was officially underway for its next athletic director. Not unlike the lava flow, progress has been, to be gracious about it, gradual.
These days, with expenses still ascending and marketing concepts like “Brand Name Integrity” exerting increasing influence on athletics, most schools don’t take this long to make such an important decision. Regardless if the subject is Division I, II, III or NAIA, the adage about the athletic department being the front porch of the university is just as true anywhere you go.
Every community in the country that includes a college athletics department understands those teams represent them in the public consciousness. The reason the front porch analogy is a cliché is because of its inherent truth, and while most of us don’t demand or expect championships, we do want to see our teams compete.
All of that has been put on the back burner while UH-Hilo administrators have gone through this very methodical process that finally generated two finalists for the position. The school did well to present each of them publicly and allow for a question and answer session.
That’s the good news. When the decision is finally made, lights will go back on, the Vulcans’ athletic department will be back in business and the new guy can roll up his sleeves and begin repairing the erosion that has occurred through negligence over the last year and a half.
The good news doesn’t stop there, either. For all its leisurely procession, the school’s search committee seemed to produce two fully qualified and capable finalists in Josh Doody, the AD at Notre Dame de Naumr in Silicon Valley, California, and Pat Guillen, the former AD at Cal State-Dominguez Hills, 10 miles outside of Los Angeles.
For me, Guillen is the best fit. He lost his father before he ever knew him and was essentially raised by a Japanese family that informed his understanding on culture that can only help him in his professed desire to bring the Aloha spirit to the job.
“Building, nurturing and maintaining relationships are a strength (of his),” Guillen said. “We can never forget, ever, we are all in this together, from the administration to coaches, students, the community, the people who support us financially, we are all doing this together.”
That adds up to a great deal of disparate constituents, many seemingly headed in different directions, all interested at some level, in a strong athletic department.
That brings us to a bit of a sensitive subject because the school’s ultimate decision-maker, Chancellor Don Straney, has not projected an image to the community of an enthusiastic supporter of athletics. In his personal bio on the school’s website, many of Straney’s accomplishments are listed from his time at Cal-Poly but the word athletics does not appear, anywhere in his past accomplishments. It wouldn’t be right to make too much of that, though the extended wait while the department tried to tread water in a choppy sea of a high-shelf Division II conference, wasn’t helpful to building, nurturing or maintaining the department.
The right thing to do is to continue to wait and see what direction the school decides to go, and if that is with Guillen at the top, repairs to recruiting, sponsorships and all the rest could happen relatively soon.
Guillen talked about a Wall of Fame for distinguished former Vulcan athletes, he mentioned the average budget is about $3.8 million per school in the Pacific West Conference, a full million above what UH-Hilo has to work with, but he stated he has a plan to raise at least an additional $600,000, which can only help.
Some of the damage, such as the lack of youth clinics, can be easily repaired. It seems incumbent on the most geographically isolated school in the United States to do everything it can to maximize its local recruiting, starting as young as possible, yet there are no camps here this summer. Free camps for keiki to learn baseball, basketball, softball, soccer, and volleyball are not being held and that’s unacceptable for a fully functioning collegiate athletic department.
It’s time for the end of inertia. The future is encouraging and it might arrive any day now.
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