Departing prestigious Ohio State University at Columbus, Ohio, for Honolulu to take charge of the University of Hawaii’s athletic programs was anything but easy for Ben Jay.
"It was tough to leave," Jay recalls, "because it was where I grew up, a school that I have a tremendous respect for."
Named UH athletic director in December in the wake of the "Wonder Blunder," Jay, 56, has already caused some ripples over his changing of the UH men’s team names, but has since calmed them. Now, with the forgiving of the athletics department’s accumulated deficit — the $13 million will be absorbed by the UH-Manoa chancellor’s office — he is graced with a financial fresh start.
Jay earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting at Ohio State and, after a few jobs at a minor league baseball team and the major league Cleveland Indians, returned to Columbus to earn a master’s degree in athletics administration in 1989.
He served as an assistant athletics director at Fairfield (Conn.) University and then returned again to the Pacific 10, for which he served on a number of NCAA committees.
"It was always the school that my parents wanted me to go to," he explained. "Ohio State has always been near and dear in our family’s hearts. My dad was a huge Buckeye fan, a Woody Hayes guy."
Jay’s wife, Ling, also a Columbia native, is remained there so their children — 13-year-old Taylor and 10-year-old twins Olivia and Bryan — could finish the school year, and Jay said they will make the move to join him in Honolulu on June 16.
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QUESTION: How does your job here differ from what you did at Ohio State?
ANSWER: There, obviously, I was running a bigger enterprise. I was in charge of a $134 million budget, supporting 36 sports and 1,076 student athletes. But in that role, I was second to, obviously assisting, Gene Smith, the athletic director there. I had an operational role. I took on many projects for Gene.
There, it was more just get the job done. Here, the leadership really steps in because I have to make some critical decisions that takes the direction of the program and working with our team. Building our team to get better and to get our program better is a huge responsibility, and with the nature of the University of Hawaii athletics being the pro team, essentially, for the most part, in Hawaii, there is a community here that this is so important to them, that I feel that responsibility.
Q: Is there a difference dealing with this bureaucracy?
A: Yeah, obviously there is. There’s bureaucracy obviously at any large university, but I think, certainly, the way things work here, it’s complicated. It’s a very complicated situation, and I’m just learning how to maneuver through it, the way things work here, and also learning in the process how the island works.
Q: Is social media one of those activities that is part of your approach?
A: In today’s world, social media has been playing such a big part of getting your message out, getting the communications out, about the good things that are happening, about the things that our student athletes are doing. Those types of accomplishments, when our teams are winning, is what the public wants to know, and also for the fact that in this day and age, that’s where the young people here are getting their information from. … For me, it’s been Twitter. Obviously, most everybody already knows that I’m on Twitter. My name is @HawaiiManoaAD and folks have obviously been following me, getting their information.
Q: What do you see in the Mountain West Conference and Hawaii as a permanent member?
A: The Mountain West is a perfect place for us to be to play football. It’s a strong conference. Now that we are at 12 schools — I think the 12 are very, very good football-playing schools that will be competitive — that is going to be sending representatives to our BCS bowls, and I think certainly it has become one of the more recognizable name conferences in the country.
Q: Do you see UH participating in other sports with the Mountain West?
A: Not at this time. I think we are fine where we are right now, playing football only in the Mountain West, playing the other sports, for the most part, in the Big West Conference. It certainly helps us with our travel, in respect to having to travel to only California for those sports.
Q: You decided in February to begin calling the men’s teams Warriors in July and said early this month that you didn’t anticipate reversing that decision, but then you did. What happened?
A: When we were taking a look at this from the very beginning, the fact that we had five or six nicknames for our teams was confusing. And then from a branding and marketing standpoint, I knew that we had to reduce that number down to get to a common name, and so I looked at a number of different things. There was no consensus at all, I think.
From the very get-go when I got here, I’ve been asking that question and I’ve been talking story about that, thinking about reducing the number of nicknames from six down to two, or down to one even at that time. So without a clear consensus, I was looking at it from our men’s teams. We had four men’s teams that were Warriors, we had two men’s teams who were Rainbow Warriors and we had one team that called themselves the Rainbows, our baseball team.
Even amongst the coaches, when I solicited the coaches’ opinions on that, there was no consensus. There were even some who just wanted to go Warriors across the board, in all sports. … I thought the easiest thing to do at the time was just to switch the other three men’s teams to join the other four and become Warriors. …
There was too much history on the women’s side. When you take a look at Dr. Donnis Thompson, who started the women’s athletics program here, and from that inception it has always been Rainbow Wahine, and I thought that was just too strong of a history to ignore. So that’s why initially I kept it Rainbow Wahine for the women’s teams and just Warriors for the men’s teams.
But since then, obviously and clearly, the passion that’s here on the islands came through. I certainly heard it from the folks who like the Rainbow name, but, again, it was mixed. There were those who supported the Warriors name and said that they were glad I went in that direction. Again, there was no clear consensus amongst the groups.
I think the telling tale for me … While I was away, I was on a two-week road swing going to conference meetings over on the mainland, and I got a call from a family I’ve become very close to here. And the son of this family … he said, basically, "I don’t understand what all this is about, and I’m not sure what these people are saying about you, but why can’t there be a Rainbow and a Warrior?"
And I thought about it as I flew home from Boston. That was on a Sunday, and I got back and had my regular meeting with (UH Chancellor)Tom Apple on Monday morning. … I said to Tom that I think I’m going to make a change, and … what I was going to do, and Tom supported it completely. … I knew people would accuse me of flip-flopping. But for the people who know me, they know that I evaluate things pretty thoroughly before I make a definitive decision, and I did with this one. …
Q: What do you plan to do toward achieving a balanced budget?
A: The things that the chancellor and the Board of Regents have done already, obviously, removing of the ($13 million) accumulated debt service, is nice. It certainly takes a great burden off our back, but we still have a lot of work to do in regards to that. We have to apply and build those revenue streams. We have to take a look at the things we are paying for and see what we can do about raising the revenues and also streamlining some of the expenses. I think it’s a combination of that, plus building a budget that meets the needs of our student athletes, is the most important thing to me.
I just feel like where we are currently in the budget, we’re shortchanging our kids. We’re not giving them the kind of meal money on the road to eat properly. … I think from our coaching standpoint,
I need to help them with their recruiting budgets. We have a unique recruiting situation here. Being this far out in the middle of the ocean, we have to fly everywhere to recruit, whereas we do a very good job, I think, in terms of keeping the local kids here.
(Football Coach) Norm Chow and I talk about making sure that we’re keeping two out of every three local kids to play here at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, because we think they’ll like playing in front of their friends and families and things here. Other than that, our crew has to go out to the mainland, to Asia, and to Europe, even, to recruit, and we need to make sure that we’re providing them enough dollars to do that.
Q: What do you think of the situation at Aloha Stadium and how would you like to see it changed, if at all?
A: The stadium situation is a difficult one here, because I’m walking into a situation where we’re basically renters at the stadium.
We’re having to pay for the operating costs over there, yet we don’t receive any of the revenue benefits from our events over there. It’s difficult because what they’re selling is UH football. … When a sponsor is going in there and paying the money, they think that they’re being attached to UH football, which we all love here in the islands, and yet our athletics program is not receiving any of the money from that, from merchandising, from concessions, from parking, nor from the sponsorships that they’re selling, the sign boards, the messages on the video boards or whatever. The only thing that we’re receiving is really some of the advertising from around the field ring, and that is the only piece that we’re getting.
On top of the fact that what revenue they generate that doesn’t cover the operating expenses, I have to make up the difference, and that could be anywhere from $20,000 to $70,000 a game. … But this is not the fault of the folks who are over there. They’re good people. They have a stadium to operate. This is much larger than them. They are doing what they need to do to be financially self-sufficient over there. … It’s a broken model. That revenue should be coming to us because that is what they’re selling — University of Hawaii football — and that is what’s attracting sponsors to pay money to be there.
Q: Should UH have its own stadium?
A: The university needs to have its own stadium, or at least control of the stadium, because that, I think, is what we can do to generate additional revenues that would help pay for our program, … and also be able to not rely on so much institutional support in order for us to do what we need to do.
Q: It was suggested at one time that a stadium could be near Kapolei, near the University of Hawaii’s West Oahu campus. What do you think about that?
A: You ought to have a place where the infrastructure is such that you can get traffic in and out. If there’s available space for an event, you ought to consider it. If there’s enough space at the current stadium, where you go into the parking lot and then turn on the old stadium, you ought to look at it.
But I think in this day and age, the only smart play in all of this is to do a private-public partnership and build a development around it — retail, housing, whatever it may be — to help pay for it and to help support it.
I think on game days it would be terrific because of all the garage spaces and everything you would need to help support what in my mind should be a 30,000-seat stadium. In order to support that bill, to support garages for that, you need daily traffic and you need businesses around that, in order to be able to fill cars up in those garages.
Q: What would you like to see in the next president of UH?
A: President (M.R.C.) Greenwood has done many, many good things at this university and has put this system in the right direction, in terms of looking forward, growing the university. … I hope that the next president has the same idea of progressing and advancing this institution academically. I know that’s what Tom Apple wants to do.
We need to grow not only this athletics program but also its academic standing in the eyes of the rest of the world, in order for us to, I think, become that institution that becomes the place of learning where kids on the mainland want to come to.
