Rainbows should
play with big boys

Poll shows people want
the football team to be on par
with the major powers

By Cindy Luis
Star-Bulletin

Perhaps a national championship is unrealistic, but a primary goal of the University of Hawaii football team should be to compete -- and be able to compete -- on a regular basis with the major college powers, according to a recent statewide poll conducted for the Star-Bulletin and KHNL NBC Hawaii News 8.

The telephone survey of 420 registered voters was done by Mason-Dixon Political/Media Research Inc. of Columbia, Md., Sept. 11-14. The margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Other key findings of the poll are:

Just less than half of the people said they believe the state is doing enough to support the program in order to compete at the highest level;

Fifty-eight percent favor the Rainbows playing at least half of their games in the afternoon;

Roughly 70 percent either didn't recognize or had a neutral reaction to the names of football coach Fred vonAppen and athletic director Hugh Yoshida.

Forty-eight percent of those polled said they could envision the Rainbow team competing on a regular basis with major college powers and also believed it should be a primary goal of the program to do so. Forty-six percent said they believed the state was doing enough to support the football program.

"But I think if they are going to support the sports programs, they should also be spending the same amount on upgrading the educational programs," said UH alumna Lei Medeiros of Mililani. "Of course, I think the goal should always be to excel, but I don't keep up enough with the football team to make an educated guess whether they can compete at the Top 25 level."

Medeiros attended football games when she was in school, she said, and enjoyed the evening games because of the cooler weather. "But from a strategic point of view, the afternoon games does put the other team at a disadvantage with the heat," she said.

Thirty-six percent of poll respondents said they would prefer an equal balance of evening and afternoon games and 22 percent said they favor all games being played in the afternoon.

"I haven't attended football games in a long time," said Kevin Higa of Hawaii Kai. "It's hard with small kids. It would be easier to find someone to take care of the kids if the games are in the afternoon."

Higa said he would like to see the Rainbows compete at the national level but "given the conference they're in (Western Athletic Conference) and this not being a great area for recruiting, I don't know how realistic it is," he said. "It's not impossible, but it's going to be a tough to do."

"I think that given the right management and right decision-making, any school can compete at the national level," said Ronald Beach, Honolulu.

VonAppen got a favorable rating from 30 percent of those polled. One percent said they had an ufavorable opinion of the coach. Twenty-five percent said their reaction to vonAppen was neutral and 44 percent said they didn't recognize his name.

Yoshida's rating was 13 percent favorable and unfavorable. Thirty-one percent of respondents had a neutral reaction to his name and 42 percent didn't recognize it.

"I think the poll points out some of the statewide naivete as to Division I competition," vonAppen said. "As far as being able to compete at the top level, we're not going to do it until we get our house in order.

"I want to play afternoon games and have given four reasonable reasons for it that the president (Kenneth Mortimer) agrees with."

Regarding afternoon games, Yoshida said, "There are advantages to the national coverage. But there's also been a strong reaction from our fans as to being in the heat on the mauka side.

"Right now, our goal is to be competitive in the WAC and be in the Top 40 for the Sears Cup. The Sears Cup looks at programs across-the-board where there is a sense of excellence. We can compare ourselves with the rest of the institutions, not only from a football standpoint but the entire sports program itself."