The Board of Regents Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics showed little interest in cutting sports as a way for the financially challenged University of Hawaii athletic department to reduce debt.

Although the group tasked athletic director Ben Jay with identifying all possible avenues, including eliminating sports, the committee said it found none of the three "options" that involved eliminating teams palatable.

"None of these options seem to be very feasible or desireable," regent Simeon Acoba said.

Sailing, men’s and women’s swimming and diving, and men’s volleyball had been identified in various scenarios that would save the school $533,000-$1.37 million, according to the report. Cutting football would have actually cost the department $1.8 million, the report read.

Sailing coach Andy Johnson appealed to the group to "look at every option possible" to retain the current 21-team lineup. His program has been in operation for 45 years and produced two national titles. He acknowledged it is, "probably the least visible program" but also noted his sailors pay a total of $450,000 a year in tuition and fees.

Chairman Jeff Portnoy said, "cutting sports is at the absolute bottom of the list of contingencies. It always has been and, I think, it always will be."

The committee met for 56 minutes in reviewing Jay’s 93-page "The Financial State of Hawaii Athletics: Version 2.0 — Revising the Game Plan" and said it will continue to study the report but offered no new immediate solutions.

Portnoy said, "multiple people, organizations, including the Hawaii Tourism Authority, the Legislature, the university, you name it, have got to step up to the plate and say we want a competitive athletic program; we want to keep the program we have. We want to be competitive and we need to find the resources to do it."

Asked for his assessment, Jay said, "it will have to come externally, I don’t see any other options."

UH receives the lowest amount of subsidies in the nine-member Big West and ranks ninth in the 12-school Mountain West, according to a 2013 USA Today survey. The study also noted just 23 of 228 NCAA schools balance their books.

UH is also the only school that pays travel expenses for its conference opponents, approximately $1.2 million per year.

Meanwhile, Gov. David Ige said it was the school’s call on how it spent general funds.

"I’ve been a big proponent and supporter of autonomy," Ige said. "And they’ve always said if we move from line item budgets to lump sum budgets and we gave them general funds, and they’ve asked for the authority to move ’em around, and I really do support that. And I do think that they need to make a decision as to how they want to expend the general funds that they receive. I do know that they had made a request for athletics. And again, we determined what we believed the ceiling should be and we turned it around and asked them to spend the money we were willing to give them. I don’t think they decided to spend any additional funds on athletics."

UH has not dropped a sport since 1985 when it eliminated women’s track so that it could add softball. Track was reinstated in 2000.

The last men’s sports to be cut were track and wrestling in 1977.