Something worth having is something worth saving. And it’s certainly not worth ignoring.

That’s basically what is happening to the University of Hawaii football program and its Division I status.

Not because of UH but due to the predicament the institution was put in by our local indecision-makers regarding this protracted stadium issue.

To wit:

>> For the first time in nearly 100 years since Honolulu Stadium was built in 1926, Oahu has no legitimate stadium, one we all can call a gathering place.

>> No stadium means a dwindling UH fan base, and the longer this drags on — the latest projection is the new Aloha Stadium will be built by 2027 — an entire demographic will be lost, with high school football possibly stealing what used to be a UH following.

>> No stadium means no tailgating, a nationwide phenomenon that unifies families, friends and fans, and something that’s an underrated part of the football experience.

>> No stadium means losing recruits, impacting UH’s win-loss record and eventually damaging its status in Division I, thereby exterminating all the non-revenue-generating sports.

Who knows? Maybe that’s what our indecision-makers want — to drop to a lower division program like it was back before the 1970s, back to when teams like Linfield, Santa Clara and New Mexico Highlands were often on the schedule, and back to a time when high school football was king.

Give UH and athletic director David Matlin credit for shoveling through all this political nonsense and forging ahead by retrofitting its on-campus Ching Complex, first from 2,000 seats to its current 9,300 and next to 17,000, hopefully by next season.

Cramping our style

But even with this bleacher-style seating — Matlin compared it to an erector set — the site is not conducive to comfort.

“It’s super tight, there’s not a lot of hip room. It’s just uncomfortable,” said Lance Kimura, co-owner of the House of Photography who got hooked on UH football as a student super rooter in 1981 and immediately after became a season-ticket holder. “Once you sit down, it’s very hard to get up and get out, unless you’re in the aisle, to get food or use the restroom. Basically once we sit, we’re stuck there.”

Kimura says the Ching environment is “way more intimate. … If they do build a new stadium, I hope they put in regular theatre seats.”

Maryellen Ing is a legacy ticket-holder with eight season tickets at the Ching Complex. A bank consultant with more than 40 years in the industry, Ing goes back to when she attended games as a young child at 25,000 wooden-seat Honolulu Stadium, affectionately known as “The Termite Palace.” Later her family became one of the first ticket-holders at Aloha Stadium. She now brings — drags? — her husband, two grown children, other relatives and her granddaughter to UH games. That granddaughter now attends the University of Oregon, so talk about experiencing the haves and have-nots.

“I applaud UH for quickly creating a fun venue to keep UH football alive,” Ing said in a text.

As far as the stadium situation, Ing offered two opinions. “One is from the senior view and one is from the younger view. From the senior point, it’s (Ching Complex) very cramped, the seats are hard. It’s tiny. You don’t have the football college experience. It’s more a high school experience. …

“The younger group — both my kids are University of Hawaii graduates, my niece is a UH graduate — they attend the games with me, but their peers who were at the University of Hawaii with them do not attend.

“They’ve lost interest, and that may be predating back to the (Norm) Chow time, and now it’s compounded, tickets are more expensive, there’s no camaraderie of the boys getting together, the families, so lots of things have been lost with the loss of Aloha Stadium.”

Not having a stadium, she said, is “killing a demographic group for UH.”

Kimura agrees a fan base is being lost because of the stadium situation.

“The question is if they do build a bigger one, whether everybody will come back,” he said. “It’s hard to know. If they had a season like when (June) Jones came in, and they went crazy and if Timmy (Chang) gets them there, and the stadium is there at the same and there’s that synergy I think it could come back, but not to the depth (back then). When we’re in college, we were doing 50,000. It was sold out, the place was rocking.”

High school vs. UH

So with this fissure between UH loyalists and potential future fans, could high school football — whose state playoffs begin next week — wedge itself in and become king again like it was in the 1960s?

High school games recently have gone head-to-head on Saturdays against UH home games. Just Saturday, an ILH playoff game between Punahou and Saint Louis was played at Farrington. Two OIA championship games were played at Mililani.

While high school crowds have been terrific (3,000-plus) in pockets of communities, Star-Advertiser staff writer Paul Honda thinks there’s only been a slight uptick in the big games.

So the upside for college supersedes preps. By comparison, the largest crowd to watch a high school game was 32,812 in the 1978 Prep Bowl (Waianae 14, Kamehameha 6), while UH had 18 sellouts (50,000 tickets distributed) and went 14 consecutive years (1980-1993) of averaging more than 40,000 per game. In the 2007 Sugar Bowl season, UH averaged more than 43,000.

“Saturday was kapu for University of Hawaii football,” Ing said. “and there was no competition and you would see many of the high school families there, the high school coaches there, you don’t see that any more. You don’t see any of the coaches there. So we’ve lost that fan base right there. And those are born and raised from Pop Warner, watching and playing football.”

Mililani football coach Rod York, whose team lost to Kahuku on Friday in the OIA championship but will play in the state tournament on Nov. 18, doesn’t like going head-to-head with UH Saturday home games.

“I can tell you this, Hawaii football should be the No. 1 show in the state when they play,” said York, a UH player in the 1990s and a member of the 1992 Holiday Bowl squad that was honored at Saturday’s game.

“We should not be having these games. Make the games on Thursday (like they do on the mainland, York says), make games on Friday, Wednesday night games if we got to. We should be supporting the University of Hawaii. Every high school kid should be at that game, and the coaches. …

“I tell the coaches every time when we have a Saturday game, what the (expletive) are we doing here, we all should be at the UH game, tailgating, having fun. Why the hell are we playing here at this time.”

The tailgate experience

York points to the importance of what tailgating does for team and community bonding.

“That’s Hawaii culture,” York said. “When you have a game, you want tailgate.”

York attended Saturday’s game — his first this year because his team always plays on Saturdays or UH is on the road when he’s been free — and rented a “party” bus for the game for his family and his coaches and their wives. “We tailgated in the bus,” York texted on Sunday.

Ing added: “I’ve been to Ohio (State, in 2015). I’ve been to many stadiums and the spirit is unbelievable. But it starts with the tailgating. When I went to the University of Washington game (2019), we have family members there, first thing we did is get invited to their tailgate. Went to Ohio, same thing. We don’t have any of that (at Ching).”

For the players and recruits, having a proper collegiate venue might be the final attraction.

“In reality, when you got a kid who’s getting recruited by all these big schools, even the Mountain West schools, and then you come to Hawaii, and you look, like brah, they don’t even have a stadium. What the heck is this?” York said.

“You gonna miss out on a whole bunch of athletes that can play.”