Athletics
AD Corner: Renters or Owners?
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
Dexter Irvin
As most of you know my family and I just recently moved to Hawaii. During the past thirty years when we moved, we purchased our homes and land in the great places we lived.
When we came to Hilo, we planned to buy a home in this wonderful place and we still do. But like many people, selling a home when you move is not an easy thing to do.
So as much as we wanted to buy right away, we found a great home and for the first time since 1978 we became renters.
So what is the big deal with renting? Nothing really, many of us spend our entire lives renting. We rent cars, homes, equipment and businesses. I had a friend who rented a dog.
The epiphany to me is how free of responsibility I feel renting my home (please don’t tell my landlord) and I believe this mind-set has the potential to be dangerous for me. The lack of ownership may breed complacency and a behavior that could erode my self esteem and sense of accomplishment.
Having spent an entire lifetime building my rather large cache of self esteem, mostly based on a sense of ownership, I would like to keep all of those attributes in place.
Being critical of individuals who establish some sense of ownership in assets that clearly do not belong to them is an easy task. All of us have heard people talk about “my school” or “my University” or maybe even, “my State” or “my neighborhood” and ultimately “my Country”. I have found it helpful for me to depict “my gym” or “my basketball court” even though they clearly are not paid for by me. However by claiming some small portion of ownership, I am saying to my subconscious that it is okay to take pride and responsibility for these things.
The ultimate goodness would be to have a constructive influence on all those that we are associated with and everything we come in contact with, regardless of ownership. Perhaps if I can accomplish that objective I will know that I have “made it”. I think until then I will have to continue to claim some sense of ownership in the things that I profess to care about.
At the University of Hawaii at Hilo Office of Intercollegiate Athletics we are seeking to display a sense of pride that comes from ownership. Indeed we are but renters of the public trust in both facilities and in our students but that optimistic satisfaction of ownership is something that we seek to return to our students, our faculty and staff, and to all of the Big Island.