The University of Hawaii baseball schedule and those of some other sports continue after the spring semester ends. This year’s UH football season begins Aug. 23 with a home game against Stanford, two days before fall classes start. Women’s volleyball sometimes opens a couple of days before football.

And it’s not like nothing goes on in college athletics after the last out and before the first serve. Even when the intercollegiate teams aren’t playing, there’s plenty of work for the athletic department staff. Athletic director, in particular, is a 365-day-a-year job.

Conferences hold meetings in the summer, and UH is in the process of moving most of its teams out of the Big West and into the Mountain West, which makes those meetings even more important.

There are always contracts to negotiate and sign. Of particular importance in the coming months is the media rights triangle of UH, Spectrum and the conferences with millions in revenue for the athletic department’s budget at stake.

Also, the next few months are especially important ones in the planning of the New Aloha Stadium Entertainment District, the centerpiece of which is the stadium that planners say should be ready for Warriors football in 2028. Aloha Halawa District Partners and the state are firming up plans in the hopes of a signed agreement this summer. The UH athletic director is among those with a say in what happens with the stadium.

Then there’s the continual change that started a few years ago with the advent of name, image, likeness compensation for student-athletes, the transfer portal, and the collectives of boosters who are supposed to operate independently of the school. Although it might seem like there are no longer any rules in this realm, there really are, and the AD is at least partly responsible for making sure they are followed and how to deal with the new paradigm.

We can all agree that’s a lot, right? Athletic director at UH has always been a tough job, and it’s more challenging than ever before.

When I first heard new UH president Wendy Hensel’s goal of when to have a new AD in place, one of my first thoughts was that nine months — even if three of them are June, July and August — is way too long for a Division I program to be without an athletic director who doesn’t have the interim or acting tag.

“We are aiming to have someone in place by the end of the summer — or, if we’re lucky, by the beginning of the summer,” said Hensel, at the Jan. 16 Board of Regents meeting.

To some degree, we all make our own luck. One way to do that in this case would be to forget about spending time and money on a national search firm.

Lois Manin started as acting AD on Dec. 2, after Craig Angelos was fired. Manin has worked in athletic administration at UH since the 1990s, interrupted only by a stint as deputy manager at Aloha Stadium, and is a seasoned, competent leader. Manin has served as the No. 2 executive in the department for more than a decade, and was David Matlin’s chief of staff. Manin’s first statement as acting AD included that she would not apply for the job when it opened.

Even if UH has its new athletic director installed in May, Manin will have been in this temporary spot as acting AD for at least six months. That’s twice as long as Carl Clapp did it between the time Herman Frazier was fired and Jim Donovan was hired in 2008 and also longer than Rockne Freitas (whose regular job was on upper campus), when he was the bridge between Donovan and Ben Jay in 2012.

Undoubtedly, others in the department have and will step up to help get the job done in various ways, but there’s no good time for the athletic department to be shorthanded, especially at the top, and especially for an unprecedented length of time.