Yoshida knew great high school coaches don't necessarily make good college coaches. So he hired a more seasoned coach. But he offered Lee an assistant coaching job at UH to gain college experience and position himself to become the next head coach.
Lee declined, but that didn't make it any less a good move by Yoshida. The shame of it is that Yoshida's boosters didn't do him the same favor before throwing him in over his head as UH athletic director.
Much of the turmoil in UH athletics can be traced to that mistake. Never was it more apparent than during Yoshida's press conference Thursday to ask nobody in particular for guidance out of the athletic morass.
Yoshida had done a fine job of running the OIA when the late UH athletic director Stan Sheriff hired him out of the high school ranks to be his assistant AD.
When Sheriff died less than two years later, UH President Kenneth Mortimer announced a nationwide search for a top AD. But the political types who hold the university purse strings threw their weight behind Yoshida.
There's nothing wrong with giving preference to local job candidates. Too many of our best jobs are filled by imports while too many of our best local prospects have to go to the mainland to find decent work. It was good that UH was grooming Yoshida to replace Sheriff. But Yoshida wasn't ready when Sheriff died.
UH officials could have enticed a top veteran athletic director near the end of his career to Hawaii. He could have taught the UH a few new tricks while preparing Yoshida for the job.
About now, a better trained Yoshida would be taking over the reins of a much stronger program. Instead, he is suffering the effects of two decisions he made that a more experienced athletic director might have avoided:
After it became clear that Bob Wagner's days at the UH were numbered, Yoshida compounded the problem by extending Wagner's contract for another year. That extra year galled fans when Yoshida later fired Wagner and had to buy out his contract for nearly $200,000. The wasted money could have gone a long way toward paying for the year-round training table Fred vonAppen is screaming about.
He then hired a good friend - vonAppen - to replace Wagner. No knock on vonAppen's coaching abilities, but friendship wears thin real fast when egos and careers are on the line.
At least Jerry Jones and Jimmy Johnson won two Super Bowls for the Dallas Cowboys before their long friendship publicly exploded.
So Yoshida finds himself with unhappy coaches in football and basketball who have shown him big public displays of disrespect. The school's two marquee sports are playing to half-empty arenas.
AND the athletic director is stuck. There's no way Yoshida can buy out another coach unless he's prepared to follow him out the door.
So what do we do now? We show patience. Yoshida may be in over his head, but he has the job and deserves a fair chance to show how strong a swimmer he is. Nobody wants the UH to regain athletic glory more than Yoshida.
It's also time to pony up the resources to make it happen. UH sports matter enough to the community to warrant some financial priority. Filling the seats in those half-empty arenas will bring in more than it will cost to set the program straight.
