More than 35 years after University of Hawaii athletic director Stan Sheriff first rolled out plans for an on-campus arena, a final element of his vision will be realized with the addition of a naming sponsor.

Sheriff’s initial concept for the facility didn’t involve having his own name attached in large silver letters the way it has been for the last 22 years but, rather, a company paying the athletic department for the privilege of placing its brand on the building.

That announcement finally came Thursday when Bank of Hawaii said it would pay UH $5 million over a 10-year period to have the 10,300-seat facility renamed SimpliFi Arena at Stan Sheriff Center (though the sign currently calls it, “SimpliFi Arena by Bank of Hawaii at Stan Sheriff Center).

SimpliFi Mortgage is BOH’s online mortgage application platform.

It is the largest naming rights agreement UH athletics has received since the Clarence T. C. Ching Foundation gave the school $5 million to help renovate and expand the former Cooke Field in 2008. That gift was augmented with state funds.

Peter Ho, BOH CEO, said the agreement with UH, “Was really the convergence of a couple of things. SimpliFi is our online brand and we have had a need to socialize the term in the community and I thought the Stan Sheriff (Center) would make a good venue for that. So, we were kind of going down that path when COVID-19 hit and we just thought it was a time to accelerate (the giving to UH).”

BOH will also contribute $100,000 toward a scholarship endowment in Sheriff’s name.

“The way we positioned it to the university was, in order for us to go to the next step, I needed to know that the (Sheriff) family was was supportive and thinks (the name change) is a good idea,” Ho said.

At the University of Northern Iowa, the Hawaii-born Sheriff’s previous stop as an athletic director, he led the charge to build the 16,324-seat UNI-Dome in Cedar Falls. When he took the UH job in 1983, Sheriff hung a framed a picture of the UNI-Dome on the wall behind his desk as a reminder of the mission to replace antiquated Klum Gym at UH.

“I remember (Sheriff) as a big thinker and innovator,” Ho said.

Sheriff relentlessly drove the project, often against powerful opposition, one reason friends say that may have contributed to his death in January 1993, 20 months before the the $32 million arena opened.

At the Holiday Bowl, three weeks before his death, Sheriff said he hoped to have a naming sponsor on board by the time the arena debuted and disclosed that he had talks with a major hotel chain about the possibility.

When the state’s largest indoor sports venue opened in 1994, it was initially known as the Special Events Arena because nobody had followed through on Sheriff’s vision and a campaign to name it in Sheriff’s memory ran into resistance from some members of the Board of Regents who didn’t want it named after a person.

But in 1998, with a change in the board’s membership, it was decided to rename the facility the Stan Sheriff Center in his memory.

In its existence, the Sheriff Center has been home for UH’s men’s and women’s volleyball and basketball teams as well as the site of state high school championships and hosted the Los Angeles Lakers, Clippers and U.S. Olympic teams and beauty pageants.

The Sheriff family has given its blessing to the name change. “It is great deal to support UH athletics, so I think it is definitely something my dad would have been happy with,” Rich Sheriff said.

Even more than 35 years later.