After University of Hawaii coach Norm Chow challenged the community with a “let’s-do-this-together” approach to building the football program at his inaugural press conference, Mark Teruya took him up on it.

One case of apples, oranges, bananas, nectarines and plums at a time.

Which is why twice a week a truck from Teruya’s family-owned fruit and vegetable wholesaler, Armstrong Produce, has begun pulling up behind the Stan Sheriff Center and unloading approximately 250 pounds of donated produce.

Enough, we’re told, to supply nutritious post-workout snacks daily for not only the football team, but, beginning this semester, the rest of the nearly 500 student-athletes at UH as well.

It is one of the biggest examples of the grass-roots effort UH has encouraged to help upgrade football and other programs in times of financial need. Major facility upgrades take time, but here was an immediate and visible need.        

Since the NCAA passed bylaw 16.5.2(h) — known in athletic circles as the “fruit, nuts and bagels rule” — in 2009, schools have been permitted to provide certain post-workout snacks to their players. Which the NCAA tightly regulates right down to specifying what spread (peanut butter, jelly, cream cheese, etc.) they are allowed to accept for use on those bagels.

Those schools that could afford to, that is. At marquee outposts such as Florida, the bill can run to nearly $60,000 a year for the football team alone, the Wall Street Journal reported. At institutions of more limited means or those awash in red ink, such as UH, snack availability can be hit-and-miss. Sometimes more miss than hit.

Scholarship and non-scholarship athletes on their own shoestring budgets would often go without, coaches said. “A lot of times when we have early morning workouts and they have to get to class, they don’t bother to eat any kind of breakfast,” Wahine volleyball coach Dave Shoji has observed.

Chow, who arrived from Utah and UCLA, schools whose athletes had benefit from a regular nutrition program since the NCAA lifted the gate, was surprised UH was doing without it. And concerned.

“He (Chow) said, ‘we expect these athletes to train hard and, yet, we don’t provide them with the necessary nutrition,’” said Bonny Amemiya, a booster club board member, who used her Hawaii Food Industry Association contacts to bring the coach and Teruya together.

What began with a snack spread for spring football practice has expanded this fall, officials said, to include all sports. “It is hard enough for them working out but if they don’t nourish their bodies afterward, all that hard work can go for naught,” Teruya said. “I’ve been up there (to the UH weight room) to see for myself and it was very enlightening.”

Now, Shoji noted, “our athletes grab a piece of fruit on their way out of the weight room. That’s something healthy and good for them.”

Meanwhile, the search for a nut and bagel benefactor goes on.

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