The University of Hawaiʻi once again recovered the future of sports in our greatest higher education institution. President Wendy Hensel and the University Board of Directors should consider supporting the sports in which we undoubtedly excel, rather than fighting to be competitive in primary university team sports: football, basketball and baseball .
As the only island state of the country, we are surrounded by water and many of us grow up by recreating, building many muscles and skills necessary to excel in water -based sports.
However, our best swimmers go to university on the West Coast, even to swimming powers in the Midwest, leaving our university only marginally competitive in a sport where Hawaiʻi has once ruled the swimming pool on a national and international scale, With swimmers who have trained to irrigation ditches, evolving into world class competitors.
(Read “The three -year swimming club: the unprecedented story of the children of Maui’s Sugar Ditch and their quest for Olympic glory,»By Julie Checkoway).
The Story of Duke Kahanamoku’s Triummphs in Four Successive Olympic Games is Legendary, and the University of Hawaiʻi’s Swimming Complex is Named after Hawaiʻi’s Greatest Waterman, but it has yet to nurture a swimmer even close to doke ‘ ming tale to The Olympic Games since 1976, except in Water Polo.
Duke established his first world record swimming in the port of Honolulu and perfected his swimming muscles and his surfing technique, paddling and swimming in the ocean, like thousands of young people from Hawaiʻi. However, the swimming team of our university is not supported as their football team, so our best swimmers accept the offers of swimming scholarships elsewhere, and our local university team also remains common.
For years, Hawaiʻi’s world class sailors have struggled to maintain the Navigation program of the University of Hawaii, in the long financial shadow of football, basketball and baseball. However, the sailors of our university are constantly among the best in the country.
Why not fully support the sailing program, offer scholarships for the best sailors in the country to attend Uh and rely on something that people from Hawaiʻi have undoubtedly led the world for 1500 years?
Captain Cook’s newspapers suggest that Hawaiian sailors could sail in cook’s ships in the time for ultramodern British naval ships to travel a quarter of Mile Marin.
Volleyball
We have long been a volleyball plant and constantly fill the gymnasium, especially when high-flying teams are in town to face our rainbow warriors, which is more than what we can say about the filling of a Stadium when the out -of -state football teams visit.
And think about the cost difference necessary to move a fully equipped football team, with coaches, coaches, staff, equipment and dozens of players across the Pacific, compared to the move of a volleyball team- Women’s ball.
In addition, consider the cost difference between the equipment of a competitive volleyball team and a competitive football team. Have you ever seen a Big 10 football training center?
We can never allow ourselves closely, which means that we will never be a state of Alabama or Ohio, and they will continue to recruit the best football players of the nation, and to win national championships, While we languish (and let’s go bankrupt) in lower leagues.
And then there is the new university (and expensive) university football transfer portal to face. Rather said.
We are an oceanic state
If it is unlikely that we are never competitive, really competitive at the national level of university football, why do we leave football dominate the sports budget and the calendar of our university in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Why not continue what we know and could excel?
Rowing, canoeing and kayaking, for example, are a natural for children who grow up in the paddling of canoes. Different equipment, cerebral and technical vascular accidents to be sure, but learning the nuances of being competitive in a racing shell, a canoe or a kayak has proven relatively easily to all those who grew up, and there are Tens of thousands of canoeing paddles with picking the best of, here even in Hawaiʻi.
And should we not walk and direct the world in college canoeing canoeing canoeing?
And what about surfing? Our local international sport, now an official part of the Olympic Games. Should some of the best surfers in the world should not win scholarships to assist, compete and promote the University of Hawaii?
Our university excels in academics linked to the ocean such as marine biology and oceanography, attracting the best and most brilliant from around the world to these fields of study, which makes sense, so why do we not consider These academic examples when we consider our choice of sports activities too?
World class academics allow funding, grants and large dollars allocations to these areas, as well as successful sports teams draw funding from a variety of external sources.
If the money spent on football, basketball and baseball scholarships, equipment, fields, stadiums, coaches and training facilities have rather been spent for swimmers, sailors, divers , Water-Polo players, triathletes, rowers, even surfers, we could constantly become one of the best colleges and universities in the country in these sports, attracting television coverage, media attention, advertising dollars, Support for scholarships, fame and pride of former students general.
The University of Hawaiʻi has traditionally treated water sports as poor cousins for more traditional national sports, at what end?
How many former students of the UH football team have succeeded on the national football league?
How many UH basketball players played the Olympic Games?
How many UH baseball players played in the World Series? A handful at best.
As an oceanic state, we seem to understand that we should support our forces on the academic side, why would we not also rely on our forces on the sporting side?
