Not for the first time yesterday did Jim Donovan step to the plate for Mike Trapasso at the University of Hawai'i.

In announcing a one-year contract extension for the Rainbows' baseball coach, the athletic director once again went to bat for Trapasso in a crucial — and telling — situation.

Though the two episodes are eight years apart and look to be more circumstantial than calculated, they serve to now intertwine the two and strengthen a bond that few of us had seen coming even a matter of months ago.

Donovan could have cut loose Trapasso, whose five-year contract was scheduled to end June 30, yesterday and taken few hits for it after the 'Bows' early exit from the Western Athletic Conference Tournament.

Especially since they began Donovan's tenure as AD 14 months ago on decidedly awkward footing. Trapasso had been tight with Donovan's predecessor, Herman Frazier, whom it was said had promised the coach a rollover that never made it to paper.

Donovan's refusal to offer an extension upon replacing Frazier had reportedly been an early source of friction between the two. It was a curious chapter in a relationship that had its beginning in 2001 when Trapasso, then an assistant coach at Georgia Tech and candidate for the vacant UH job, and Donovan, an associate athletic director, was a member of — here's that dreaded term — the search committee.

In the process to choose a successor to Les Murakami, we're told the committee winnowed the number of candidates to a handful. At that point, the story goes, the group went through a list of names and had just about settled on which ones would go forward, minus Trapasso. At that point, someone — and we're told it was Donovan — said something along the lines of, "Hey, what about the guy from Georgia Tech ... he is the (national) assistant coach of the year."

Baseball America had put Trapasso atop its 10-man list of "best candidates to take head coaching positions with major programs" based upon a national survey.

In interviews Trapasso moved up the list. When negotiations with Arizona State's Pat Murphy, the early choice, broke down, Trapasso found himself on deck and eventually got the offer.

Fast forward to yesterday when Donovan, as much as defending his own controversial decision, stood up for the coach. Donovan praised Trapasso's effort at improving the program on several mandated fronts (attendance, academics, local recruiting, scheduling etc.).

Encouragingly, this season they have shown they can work together. Now what remains is for them to show that with the extension it can also work out for UH in the long run.