In succeeding Dennis Farrell as the commissioner of the Big West Conference, Dan Butterly said Tuesday, “It is a little overwhelming to know that I’m gonna have to fill his shoes, as big as they are.”

The University of Hawaii, perhaps more than any of the nine members of the conference, could detail for Butterly just how big those sneakers are as Farrell heads into retirement next month after 40 years with the Big West, 28 as commissioner.

Without Farrell, the majority of UH’s 21 sports teams would likely have long been without a conference to call home or paying a whole lot more for the privilege of being in one.

A decade ago Farrell not only recognized early on the shifting sands of the conference landscape, he also began the spade work to help bring UH to the Big West.

On a flight out of Indianapolis, site of the 2010 NCAA Basketball Tournament, Farrell bumped into then-UH athletic director Jim Donovan, who he had known from the Rainbow Wahine’s previous (1985-95) stay in the Big West.

In 1996 UH had been forced to terminate its Big West membership for its Wahine teams when the Western Athletic Conference decreed that all its members would have to relocate their applicable men’s and women’s teams to the WAC. And, since the WAC was where the money was at the time due to football and men’s basketball, UH complied, reluctantly leaving behind some long-standing rivalries.

At the Indianapolis airport and, later on during the flight, Farrell sounded out Donovan on whether UH might be interested at some point in returning to the Big West.

“There wasn’t anything definite going on then, but there were storm clouds forming on the horizon and I always thought UH had been a good fit for us and vice versa,” Farrell recalled.

A few months later as the WAC began to crumble, UH desperately scrambled to find new homes for its teams. The Mountain West eventually said it would take the football team at a price, but wasn’t interested in the other sports. The badly fractured WAC said it wanted all UH’s teams, including football, or no deal.

The private school West Coast Athletic Conference, largely made up of religious-based institutions, wanted no part of UH.

In the West, that left the rough road of independence, the far-flung, snowy Big Sky or the Big West.

Initially some Big West schools did not want UH, even with travel subsidies, fearing the ’Bows’ bigger budgets, as the only Football Bowl Subdivision school among them, and better facilities would pose too much of an advantage. Some Big West members wanted UH to pay an exorbitant price for admission.

“Dennis knew the value that UH could bring to the conference and finally won most of them over,” Donovan said.

Donovan and Farrell eventually swung a deal that was significantly different than what brought football to the MWC. The Big West agreed that any schools that entered the league after UH (and Cal State Bakersfield and UC San Diego will in July) would not receive travel subsidies since they knew the layout of the league when they joined. But in the MWC, even teams that came in after UH still received travel subsidies.

“Dennis was about fairness for all the members,” Donovan said. “He’s just a really good character guy, solid and dependable. You go back to those people who cut their teeth in college athletics in the 1960s and ’70s and the levels of loyalty and fairness when their word was their bond, Dennis fit all that.”

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