Ben Jay hit the sixth-month milestone in his tenure as the University of Hawaii athletic director this week, and now the fun starts.

Everything up to this point, the 18-hour days, finding out what makes the state’s only Division I athletic program tick — and discovering what holds it back — has been the easy part. Even with the swapping of nicknames.

Cobbling together a realistic budget that helps UH be competitive and that might possibly balance out somewhere around $34 million when the fiscal year concludes in 11 months is where the challenge looms.

In that Jay is being asked to do something his predecessors have managed just twice in the past 12 years. This time with no Sugar Bowl windfall in sight.

Clearly, we’re not in Columbus, Ohio, anymore.

“It is challenging, sometimes daunting, but, you know, our future depends upon us continuing to move ahead,” Jay said. “That’s all I’m thinking about; what we have to get done today, tomorrow, next week, next month. … It is, ‘OK, what’s the (next) priority? And, what do we need to tackle next?’ ”

Jay’s mandate from Bachman Hall at the time of his hiring last year was to bring major change and fiscal balance to Manoa. And while scaling a ladder to personally replace burnt-out light bulbs in dark athletic department corridors was a nice introductory touch, changing out a long-eroded financial model is something altogether different.

Everything that has been done to this point has been about getting the lay of the land and developing a strategy for what comes next.  

Manoa chancellor Tom Apple is waving away a nearly $16 million net deficit accumulated over the past decade, which is a start. But now, it is Jay’s job to keep the department solvent and prevent amassing a new debt. While his teams win some championships, of course.

It is a task that borders on the Sisyphean. A thought that has no doubt occurred after the last fiscal year ended just two weeks ago with a red-ink-soaked $3.3 million deficit and with no oil wells being erected on the campus in the meantime.

So, not only does UH have to pare back expenses while underwriting the travel of its conference opponents, it either has to sell a heckuva lot more tickets, broker additional sponsorships and hit up more donors or it has to come up with and cash in on new and considerable revenue sources. Probably all of the above.

And, it has to do it within the school’s post-Wonder Blunder constraints. “It is me having the patience with how some things can be done,” Jay said. “Like, I’ve said before, I could do something at 70 mph in Ohio, but here I have to be 45 mph.”

Except that the challenges are coming head-on now — and at a faster pace as his first school year approaches.

Six months on the job at UH? “It feels like a lot longer,” Jay said.

And to think that was the easy part.

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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.