University of Hawaii Athletic Director David Matlin has fired and hired a football coach, brought in a new coach for a men’s basketball team under investigation by the NCAA, took a deep dive into the program’s budget and brokered a deal for the Rainbow Warriors to start Down Under next season — all within his first seven months on the job.
And those were just the more visible decisions he’s made as he oversees 21 sports programs and 509 student athletes.
“I just think this job is very energizing at times and you need that,” said Matlin, 51, who was hired in April at $290,016 a year.
Matlin was born in Hawaii and stayed for two weeks before his father, former Islanders general manager Lewis Matlin, moved the family to Canada where he managed the Vancouver Mounties. They settled in St. Clair Shores, Mich., and Matlin later earned an economics degree and secondary education certificate from the University of Michigan. He met his Hawaii-born wife, Dana, during his junior year there. He also has a master’s degree in business administration from UH’s Shidler College of Business.
Matlin’s career began as director of sales and marketing for the Houston Astros. He then moved into theater management before returning to the islands with his wife in 1993 — without a job. He became a casual hire with the UH athletic department running the Midnight Ohana basketball kickoff event and other marketing projects. With no full-time opportunities, he left — but later returned to computerize the UH ticket office, “the hardest job I’ve ever had.”
Matlin had stints as a general manager for Ticket Plus and a financial planner before working for the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl with Jim Donovan, a former UH athletic director. He would later buy the company from Donovan, and also owned a travel business.
The athletic director hasn’t been athletic since taking the job, but his wife recently has encouraged him to ride a recumbent bike.
They live in Aina Haina, and have a daughter at Notre Dame University and a son at Punahou School.
Question: When you first got hired, you mentioned that this was a dream opportunity. Could you explain that?
Answer: I didn’t say dream job on purpose. That was very intentional.
It was a dream opportunity because I believe that it’s an incredible opportunity. To just to impact 500 students’ lives is a lot. That’s a generational thing. Just to play a small role is great. But University of Hawaii athletics isn’t just about the University of Hawaii. It makes an impact for the University of Hawaii. I think we help with branding of the university, exposure, applications, fundraising, aspirations. It is the state’s team so it’s an opportunity to impact the state with what we do here, and that’s pretty cool.
…The reason why it’s not a dream job is, gosh, it’s hard. I mean every decision you make is questioned. … You make the decision and then you own it. And then it’s the way you implement that decision.
Q: Are you referencing the hiring of your football coach?
A: I’ve had to hire a basketball coach as well. It’s been a busy seven months. I think what were trying to do is we’re trying to be decisive in our decision-making. At least the basketball coach and football coach, it happened pretty quickly …
Q: Could you give me an overview of the department? There are a lot of sports that no one seems to hear about.
A: The first three weeks on the job I met with one student athlete from each program. We have 21 programs. These are amazing student athletes and the thing is our average GPA of our student athletes is higher than the campus (overall). Our graduation rates are higher than the campus. I think we were about 3.0, might be a little bit less. … There’s certain programs that get a lot more notoriety — football, basketball. We’ve got a sand volleyball team that got to the national championships. Incredible student athletes, pretty amazing leaders and coaches.
Q: What about your budget?
A: We have 509 student athletes. You can look at our website, I did a deep dive. I’ll give you some high points. Our deficit this year we’re projecting to be about $4.8 million. We have about $5.2 million in expenses that none of our competitors have. … We have to pay the Mountain West travel subsidies. That’s about $1.9 million. Our increased travel costs when we travel to the mainland because we’re over the water, that’s $1.2 million. And the fact that we have quite a few student athletes, we pay about $2.2 million more in financial aid that our competitors don’t have.
… We’re actually running a slight positive, if you take that away. We have to own those things. We have to figure out ways to get around it. … A 2014 economic impact study said that we add $7 million to the tax base, to state taxes. There is $3.1 million that comes from non-scholarship athletes that pay tuition. If we didn’t have athletics, that would go away.
… We don’t want to be one of the 10 states that don’t have a Division I program. We want to be one of the haves. Really, at the end of the day, it’s really about the intangibles the Athletic Department brings that are even more valuable: the aspirations of youth, the morale boost that we give. In 2007 the economy wasn’t very good, but the football team was winning. People felt better, people felt uplifted. People found a way to travel to New Orleans. There’s a value there where I can’t define with numbers.
Q: So the value of the program outweighs the deficit?
A: The question people always ask me is, “So what’s your budget deficit?” That’s a relevant question. We need to steward our resources better, we need to improve, we’re working hard to do it. But it’s not the best question. The best question is: In the absence of UH athletics, how would it look? And how it would look is we’d have $7 million less taxes, the $3.1 million less in tuition. …Hawaii would not be as bright a place. It would be grayer. It would be missing something, and I think that’s more valuable than money. … I think we play a part in making the community a better place.
Q: Football has been the big news lately. Could you tell more about the road you took in terminating Norm Chow’s contract and then hiring Nick Rolovich?
A: First of all, Norm did a lot of things very well here. Our academic side of the house, the character. Norm’s a good man and when I took the job, before it even started, you get to like people. That’s not a fun thing to do (to fire someone), even less fun when you respect someone when they’ve had a good career and they’re a good person. Before it became a reality, before the season started I had certain (benchmarks). It’s not emotional. I said, “OK if this happens, this is when I’ll make my decision.” …So you set it up and in my mind is, once we weren’t bowl eligible. … that’s when the decision was made, and then there was a plan even several weeks ago before that decision was made about what would be the process.
The process was I was going to own the pick. There was an advisory group. It was a group of people who either work for me or work on campus, most of them, and Hugh Yoshida, who’s worked here before. They all knew I wanted different eyes looking at it from different perspectives. … It’s a lot of legwork. You talk to a lot of people, you get on the plane and you go meet the people. It’s not the thing where you just call the people on their reference list. You call the people who aren’t on the reference list. They all knew that at the end of the day, they could all say their opinion could be all person X. I told them that I’m still going to pick who I feel is best and it might not be that person. I did want their opinion, but at the end of the day it’s my call.
I own it and it really came down to the first thing you look at is character and integrity and someone that you feel will fit in this environment. … I think Nick rose to the top in that area, and there were other good candidates. Nick put together a pretty comprehensive plan that wasn’t just about Xs and Os.
So similar situation with (basketball coach) Eran Ganot. We actually got him hired in seven days. Seven days, which is lightning speed, and that enabled him to recruit. The good thing about Nick being hired now is he has a few weeks to recruit before junior college recruiting deadline, and Feb. 4 is national letter of intent day, so he has about nine weeks for that and time to put his staff together. … I’m very comfortable in both Eran and Nick. Laura Beeman (women’s basketball coach), who’s phenomenal. Dave Shoji (women’s volleyball coach) who has 40 years; it’s hard to think of a coach who’s been more successful anywhere. … And there are plenty of other coaches that are doing it and doing it the right way. I call it winning with integrity.
Q: As you go out into the community, I’m sure people know your face now. Do you get a lot of people coming up to you and maybe disagreeing with some of the decisions that you make?
A: I’ve had people say that if I don’t make this decision, I’m stupid. I say, “You could ask my wife, she can verify that.” Sometimes people even say that, if you don’t make this decision, you’re going to get fired. I say I took this job to do the job, not keep the job. But here’s what I take away from it. First of all, it’s an honor to have this job and the fact that people care; that is so much better than apathy. … When we have apathy, we really have problems.
Q: Speaking of apathy, looking at the pictures of the empty Aloha Stadium. How do you rebuild that?
A: You do it by getting a little better each day. I think the start of it is we’ve hired Nick Rolovich. He’s a warrior, a very successful football player. He’s coached here before. I think he’s doing it for the right reasons.
We’ve got to get a little better each day. It’s not going to happen overnight, it’s not going to happen next year. … We have to relook at the way we price things, the way we market, the way we provide customer service. At the end of the day, though, a lot of it has to do with wins and losses. We had a lot of our lowest attendance in the history of the stadium this year. It’s gone down by about 10 to 12 percent a year since 2007, after the Sugar Bowl. You don’t gain it all back in one year.
Q: How do you improve facilities and programs when you’re running a deficit?
A: Our job is to do the best with what we have and prioritize and just start chipping things away. A lot of times you do it through private-public partnerships. The (Clarence) T.C. Ching (Athletic Complex) was a great example of that. We have great benefactors like the (Alexander C.) Waterhouse (Sr.) Foundation who has given a million dollars for football. We get to send a lot of our student athletes to summer school, which is a big difference maker for them and they help with supplemental meals. That Waterhouse Foundation is imperative; a lot of public-private partnerships.
Q: Do you find that that’s going to be a key part of building the program, the public-private partnerships?
A: I think more and more that’s going to be a key component. It’s all about collaboration. There’s the part we do, there’s the part the university does, there’s part the students do, and then there’s the part that the government and the business community does. … Frankly, we get a lot of great support from the community. We really do. We don’t have a lot of big businesses here. … So we have to be inclusive and broaden our base as much as possible.
Q: So you have these two hires behind you now. What’s on your agenda in 2016?
A: We’re looking for some new revenue streams. We’re looking at a way to enhance our H-Zone, our merchandising, licensing, looking at some different models to work in conjunction with them. … We have the Stan Sheriff Center, Les Murakami (Stadium); we can leverage these facilities to generate needed revenues. I think there’s opportunities for concerts or other sporting events like the Lakers; the Lakers is a great example. We made about a $153,000 off of that and it was a great community event. … So we need to do more stuff like that. We’re limited to some extent in what we can do because we have a lot of events going on there, but we just need to do the best we can with what we have.
…We’re hoping to get a verdict from the NCAA soon (regarding the men’s basketball program). I’m not allowed to talk about it. … That was unfortunate, but it’s an opportunity to do better.
Our team, we were very forthright and we acknowledged that there were some things that we could have done better, and we’re working on improving things. Those are opportunities.
