News of the hire was still ringing in the ears of Pacific West Conference members when incoming University of Hawaii at Hilo athletic director Pat Guillen was summoned to the commissioner’s office last week, in a good way.
Guillen’s 75-minute one-on-one session with Pac-West commissioner Bob Hogue on Thursday was a convenient opportunity for them to get to know each other before Hogue took a mini-vacation prior to the start of school and before being introduced at the next round of league meetings.
Hogue wondered what changes Guillen had in mind for Vulcan athletics, and yes, there is a to-do list.
Changes will start with the hire of a fulltime compliance director, a crucial aspect of any NCAA program, and one in which UH-Hilo has been getting by without adequate full time personnel. On that front, Guillen, who won’t start in the new job until Aug. 21, is already working, searching for qualified and interested people who know the rules.
He hopes that somewhere within the UH system such an informed and interested person exists who needs only the opportunity, but if that isn’t the case, he will keep looking.
“Not too many things more important than being in compliance with the NCAA,” Guillen said last week after his meeting with Hogue. “There are a lot of things we’ll be doing, and I know I don’t even realize what all those things are yet, but we are pledged to do everything within the guidelines of the NCAA. Looking for the right person now gives us a three-week head start.”
Guillen brings an aloha sensibility to the job, something he realized was part of his makeup on a visit to Hawaii years ago, “but I always used to think of it as the Golden Rule,” he said. “We will develop a family-oriented approach, your family and our Hawaii-Hilo family and I promise you I will walk the ohana talk, it’s in my DNA.
The soccer program is also getting a jump-start after Guillen secured from Chancellor Donald Straney approval to seek grant opportunities for a new soccer field adjacent to the baseball and softball fields. UH-Hilo has been playing intercollegiate soccer matches on the outfield portion of the baseball stadium.
“I’ve never heard of that,” Guillen said. “I was unaware that an NCAA program would play on a baseball outfield. I’m researching grants now for possibilities and I’m serious, I want to get soccer off the baseball field.”
Former UH-Hilo AD Bill Trumbo (1990-2000), one of the school’s Hall of Fame members who is now directing the athletics department at Konawaena High School, supports the appointment while offering a dose of reality.
“He’s good with people, so that should serve him well,” Trumbo said. “I think he’s a very solid guy who knows some things about (NCAA Division II, from Guillen’s time at Cal-State Dominguez Hills), but you can’t predict success in this environment; it’s a unique situation at Hilo, not like any other school in the country, really, but he seems to be well positioned to figure it all out.”
It is anything but the most opportune time to start a new job as an athletic director, a few days before the for the first cross country meet, not much more than that before more sports begin competing. In the big picture, if Guillen had been hired a few months ago he could have all summer to hire a compliance director and meet potential sponsors and other interested parties to try to create a surge of momentum for the new seasons.
Instead, by the time Guillen is officially working, it will have been 597 days – 85 weeks – since former AD Dexter Irvin gave up the battle and headed for Arizona to start up a new program.
And you thought it took a long time to find clues to wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines plane, lost in the ocean. Finding an AD for the Vulcans took longer than locating the first broken hunk of the tragic flight, but that’s all in the past now.
Guillen is nothing if not ambitious and eager, two qualities that will serve him because the list of things that must be done to facilitate a Vulcans’ move upward in the Pac-West is a long one, that will likely only get longer once he arrives and begins to look more closely at needs.
“I don’t care about hours or issues,” he said, “I have a passion for this work, it’s calling. I’m coming to Hilo to do whatever needs to be done.”
That attitude is the right one for the job.
(Contact Bart with questions, comments at barttribuneherald@gmail.com)
