We’ve got the who, what, where, when and how.
Craig Angelos, fired, athletic director, University of Hawaii, last week, by UH president David Lassner.
The why, though, isn’t quite clear.
RELATED: UH athletic director Angelos is ‘blindsided’ by his ouster
A few months ago, around a year after he’d started here in the summer of 2023, Angelos told me he’d keep working hard, but he had no expectations of being at the job for very long. He knew that when David Lassner retired as UH president at the end of 2024 he might be gone, too.
He’d essentially be on his own, because as an “at-will” employee he has no contract, no union, and probably no history with the new president.
Wendy Hensel, the incoming president, comes from being executive vice chancellor and university provost for The City University of New York. where she’s been since the summer of 2022. Angelos was the associate athletic director at Long Island University in 2022 until he was hired at UH last year.
Their time in New York intersected for a few months, but New York is a big place and their paths probably never crossed.
And maybe it doesn’t matter if they did.
When new head coaches are hired, normally they get to choose their assistants. In many cases in the corporate and academic worlds, it’s similar.
So, this could be a case of clearing the decks for the new boss.
The only official statement about letting Angelos go came late Tuesday afternoon — about a half day after a mainland reporter technically broke the story many of us here already knew but were waiting for UH or Angelos to confirm.
UH should have released the statement last Friday afternoon, but it did not, so it has itself to blame for a lot of the character assassination and assorted rumors on social media Tuesday.
I believe Angelos when in a statement of his own he said in so many words that there’s no scandal. I don’t know him as well as I got to know other UH ADs — mostly because he wasn’t here nearly as long as the others. What I do know of him I like, and I have no reason to question his character.
Maybe I would not like working for him, but working with him was fine. He didn’t always have the answers to my questions, but he was accessible (well, until the past few days — and that was confirmation without confirmation that he’d been let go.)
As for his being blindsided and shocked, I am kind of surprised he said that, because of what he told me about his eyes being wide open about his employment status previously.
Sometimes when an executive at Angelos’ level is relieved from duty — especially seemingly out of nowhere — you can look at the circumstances of how they were hired for clues.
Remember how members of the UH Board of Regents were upset, even angry, when they confirmed Angelos in May 2023?
It took several hours of what they called “robust discussion” in private session at Honolulu Community College for them to approve Angelos, and not unanimously. It was 8-2 with an abstention.
It wasn’t, they said, because they didn’t like Angelos. What they didn’t like was that Lassner didn’t provide them (or any of us) with any other choices from the three to five names a screening committee gave him.
Without the full public support of the Regents, and the person who selected him halfway out the door, Angelos’ leverage in the power structure of Hawaii was compromised from the start.
Despite that, he achieved some significant goals that ADs before him did not. And if social media posts and a petition at change.org are considered, he’s beloved by a lot of student-athletes, and other stakeholders like him, too.
So, when a statement from UH says that Angelos was let go for performance reasons, what does that mean? He did not wave a magic wand and make a brand new stadium appear instantly in Halawa?
In a radio interview Tuesday I was asked what grade I’d give Angelos. I said pass, which could mean I do not think he failed, or that I’d rather not answer the question.
When I thought about it more later, I realized the correct grade is incomplete — and, with the facts we have available to us as of Tuesday night, it doesn’t look like Angelos got a fair shake, even under the vague assessment criteria of “performance.” It’s quite convenient for UH that it doesn’t have to tell us why, since he’s an at-will employee.
Less than two years is not enough time to properly evaluate an athletic director.
