The day after Eran Ganot first arrived here in 2006, University of Hawaii basketball coach Riley Wallace assigned him to help out at the team’s golf fundraiser.

"I got (sun) burned," Ganot recalled.

Whereupon he remembers Wallace telling him, "I wasn’t going to warn you because you need to learn the hard way."

The newly announced UH head coach tells the story to illustrate that while he returns to Manoa a rookie head coach, hopefully, his eyes are wide open to the considerable challenges that now confront him.

It is a job, he acknowledges, filled with looming uncertainties and strewn with obstacles. Something, in his case, to be embraced rather than feared.

"As weird as it sounds, as crazy as it is, I see this as a calling, an opportunity to try and fix things," Ganot said. "I want to make sure it is a good program here."

While the ongoing NCAA investigation and enforcement process hovers over everything, it is by no means the only issue that awaits the 33-year-old as he shed the welcoming lei and began rolling up his sleeves.

A priority Thursday, even before the introductory morning campus news conference, was meeting with the current players, most of whom he needs to re-recruit.

And, then, see that they work to maintain their academic eligibility.

But there is also the pressing issue of putting together a coaching staff to attempt to salvage something for the national letter of intent period that opens April 15. No small task at this advanced date on the recruiting calendar.

In his spare time there is a not much more than a half-finished nonconference schedule for 2015-16 to be completed and an army of skeptical Benjy Taylor backers to be won over. All part of a lengthy to-do list to be negotiated within tightening budget constraints.

Ganot, who spent four years (2006-2010) in Manoa during his last tour of duty as an assistant coach, made a point of saying he’s studied the program’s history and met or talked to many of those who shaped it the past four decades.

Enough, at least, to grasp that he is walking in on the most tumultuous period since the NCAA lowered the boom in 1977 and all that it implies.

Of the late Larry Little, the coach who took on that rebuilding task, Ganot said, "I know he is looking down now."

To a smaller degree, Ganot is not unfamiliar what it means to dig out from under NCAA sanctions. At Saint Mary’s, he oversaw the team’s compliance in the wake of 2013 NCAA penalties against the Gaels, violations largely committed by another assistant in 2008-09. "I was part of the rehabilitative process, so I’ve had some experience going through what could be coming on the horizon here," Ganot said.

Taken together it can all make for a daunting assignment. "People can get scared away from that, but it drew me into the job a little more," Ganot said. "There is a calling here, in my opinion. It (just) felt right. Whatever challenges lay ahead, whatever uncertainty there is, I just know that we will tackle it head-on with no excuses."

After all, he’s been burned once.

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