The University of Hawaiʻi is once again reconsidering the future of sports at our largest institution of higher learning. President Wendy Hensel and the university’s Board of Regents ought to consider supporting the sports we arguably excel at, rather than struggling to be competitive in the primary university team sports: football, basketball and baseball.

As the nation’s only island state, we are surrounded by water and many of us grow up recreating in it, building many of the muscles and skills necessary to excel in water-based sports.

However, our best swimmers generally go off to college on the West Coast, even to swimming powerhouses in the Midwest, leaving our university only marginally competitive in a sport where Hawaiʻi once ruled the pool nationally and internationally, with swimmers who trained in irrigation ditches, evolving into world class competitors.

(Read “The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory,” by Julie Checkoway).

The story of Duke Kahanamoku’s triumphs 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 Duke’s stature, nor has Hawaiʻi sent a swimming contender to the Olympic Games since 1976, except in water polo.

Duke set his first world record swimming in Honolulu Harbor and honed his swimming musculature and technique surfing, paddling and swimming in the ocean, like thousands of youngsters across Hawaiʻi. Yet our university’s swim team is not supported like its football team, so our best swimmers accept scholarship offers from swim powerhouses elsewhere, and our local university team remains an also ran.

For years Hawaiʻi’s world-class sailors have struggled to keep the University of Hawaiʻi’s sailing program afloat, in the long financial shadow of football, basketball and baseball. Yet our university’s sailors consistently place amongst the best in the nation.

Why not fully support the sailing program, offer scholarships for the best sailors in the nation to attend UH and build on something people from Hawaiʻi have arguably been leading the world on for 1,500 years?

Captain Cook’s logs suggest that Hawaiian sailors could sail circles around Cook’s ships in the time it took the state-of-the-art British naval vessels to travel a quarter of a nautical mile.

Volleyball Powerhouse

We have long been a volleyball powerhouse, and consistently fill the gymnasium, especially when top-flight teams are in town to take on our Rainbow Warriors, which is more than we can say about filling a stadium when out-of-state football teams visit.

And think about the difference in costs required to move a fully equipped football team, with coaches, trainers, staff, equipment and dozens of players across the Pacific, compared to moving a women’s volleyball squad.

Moreover, consider the difference in cost between equipping a competitive volleyball team and a competitive football team. Ever seen a Big 10 football training facility?

We’ll never be able to afford anything close, which means we’ll never be an Alabama or Ohio State, and they’ll continue to recruit the nation’s best football players, and win national championships, while we languish (and go broke) in lesser leagues.

And then there is the new (and expensive) college football transfer portal to contend with. Enough said.

We Are An Ocean State

If we are unlikely to ever be competitive, truly competitive on a national college football level, why do we let football dominate the sports budget and calendar of our university in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Why not pursue what we know, and could excel in?

Rowing, canoeing and kayaking, for instance, are a natural for kids who grow up paddling outrigger canoes. Different equipment, strokes and techniques to be sure, but learning the nuances to be competitive in a racing shell, canoe or kayak have proven to come relatively easily to anyone who grew up paddling, and there are tens of thousands of canoe paddlers to cherry pick the best from, right here in Hawaiʻi.

And shouldn’t we both promote and lead the world in collegiate outrigger canoe paddling?

And what about surfing? Our homegrown international sport, now an official part of the Olympics. Shouldn’t some of the world’s best surfers win scholarships to attend, compete for, and promote the University of Hawaiʻi?

Our university excels in ocean-related academics like marine biology and oceanography, drawing the best and brightest from all over the world to those fields of study, which makes sense, so why aren’t we considering those academic examples when we consider our choice of sports activities as well?

World-class academics draw big dollar funding, grants and endowments to those fields, much as successful athletic teams draw funding from a variety of outside sources.

If the money that is spent on football, basketball and baseball scholarships, equipment, fields, stadiums, coaches and training facilities, were instead spent on swimmers, sailors, divers, water polo players, triathletes, volleyball hitters, setters and liberos, and paddlers, rowers, even surfers, we could consistently become one of the top colleges and universities in the country in those sports, drawing TV coverage, print media attention, advertising dollars, scholarship support, fame, and bounteous alumni pride.

The University of Hawaiʻi has traditionally treated water sports as poor second cousins to the more traditional national sports, to what end?

How many UH football team alums have made it on the National Football League stage?

How many UH basketball players have played in the Olympic games?

How many UH baseball players have played in the World Series? A handful at best.

As an ocean state we seem to understand that we should support our strengths on the academic side, why don’t we also build on our strengths on the sports side as well?