Mazda helped The offices were under the old swimming pool. The locker room was also used by those taking P.E. classes. Being an NCAA member required being in a conference.
UH jump into
NCAA pool
UH turned the corner in women's
athletics under her guidanceBy Cindy Luis
cluis@starbulletin.comThat was the situation Cindy Boerner Mazda inherited when she replaced Dr. Donnis Thompson as the women's athletics director at the University of Hawaii in 1982.
Of all the problems, the largest was getting the Wahine into a league.
"That was critical for us," said Mazda, now living in Doyletown, Pa. "That was the only hope we had for recognition and to qualify for postseason."
While Mazda had her work cut out for her, she was more than prepared. She had been Thompson's assistant since 1976.
"I didn't know about Title IX until Donnis explained it to me that it was all about what women deserve in the educational atmosphere," Mazda said. "When I interviewed for the graduate assistant's job, she told me her vision to increase sports and increase opportunities.
"I thought, 'Wow, how great.' When I was in college, they had one set of uniforms for women that had to be passed on from year to year."
There were no sports for girls in her Canton, Ohio, high school until her senior year. They posted a notice in the gym about forming a track team.
"The gym teach told us about all the different events," she said. "He said the goal was to go out and run as fast as you can. That certainly sounded like more fun than gym."
Her college athletic career at Mount Union consisted of playing volleyball and softball. Mazda was also very in tune with pro football; she worked summers at the Football Hall of Fame in Canton.
When Mazda took over in 1982, she had a number of goal lines to cross. One was the transition from the Association of Intercollegiate Athletic for Women (AIAW), which had been dissolved just months prior to her hiring. (While most schools, including Hawaii, left the AIAW in 1981, some held out for another year.)
"It was a 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation, only you were more damned if you didn't," Mazda said. "You were either going to jump into the (NCAA) pool or get pushed."
Wahine athletics swam for the most part. Hawaii won consecutive NCAA volleyball titles in 1982 and '83; Gwen Loud won the 1984 NCAA long jump title; and Bill Nepfel led women's basketball to its first 20-win season in 1984-85.
What sank was Wahine track and field, one of two inaugural women's collegiate sports. Mazda made the tough decision to cut the program and replace it with softball.
"I felt badly," she said. "Everything was a money issue. We wanted more full-time coaches, we needed to increase the budget and we were focused on getting the Sheriff Center built.
"We couldn't get track teams to come to here to compete, we struggled to meet the minimum numbers of athletes and events and it was a big expense to keep sending our team to the mainland. We compared our times with local high school times and realized that we were not very good."
Mazda empathizes with schools that are now cutting men's sports ... and strongly disagrees with the Band-Aid solution.
"I think it shows a lack of creativity in looking for alternative revenue," said Mazda, who retired five years ago as the Atlantic-10 assistant commissioner. "The excess in football is mind-boggling. When a football team spends the night at a hotel before a home game, they sometimes spend more money in one night than it would take to fund a minor sport for one year.
"If people would move money around, they wouldn't need to cut programs. When the chemistry department wins a grant, the money doesn't just go to that department, it goes to the school. It should be the same with moneys generated by a sport like football. Revenue should go back to benefit the entire department.
"The problem is it's easier to drop a sport. It is so mind-boggling that we're talking about these same issues 30 years later."
UH Athletics
