Hawaii’s deep cultural appreciation for sports goes back many hundreds of years. Surfing and body boarding took shape here in the 4th century, and not long after that, papa holua – the sport of sledding down Hawaii mountainsides on long, thin wooden sleds — took off.

Jump to today, and it’s hard to drive a city block in Honolulu without passing cyclists and runners, soccer, baseball and football league play, gym rats and tennis players, stand-up paddlers and, yes, plenty of surfers and body boarders. Only crazy dangerous papa holua seems to have fallen out of favor, but our sports-obsessed culture has replaced it with a long and growing list of other choices.

Our relationship to spectator sports is a little more spotty. High school football draws capacity crowds, but University of Hawaii games and those of Honolulu’s three major private universities often struggle to find interested fans. And the National Football League Pro Bowl brings new meaning to the phrase “it takes a community” — in this case, to fill a stadium.

That doesn’t mean Hawaii’s a bad place for a sporting event, though. Very successful competitions from the world-famous Ironman Triathlon to the Honolulu Marathon to the Sony Open pro golf tournament to the recently completed Quiksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau surfing championship draw sports figures from around the globe to our islands.

But how to determine which and what kind of events are best for Hawaii today and going forward? Do we work to shore up the sparsely attended Pro Bowl, for instance, or invest scarce support funding in other, more promising ideas? And what should be done about aging, down-at-the-heels Aloha Stadium — the state’s single big, outdoor sports and entertainment venue, which critics say has been operating for 15 years without a marketing plan?

These are big, increasingly pressing questions that deserve more attention than they’re currently getting. So we were glad to see the state House come up with two bills this session that would tackle these matters head on to the benefit of our entire state.

Only one of those bills should be passed this legislative session, though. House Bill 2229, which cleared the House last week and now moves on to two committee referrals in the Senate, would establish a Hawaii Sports Task Force within the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. It’s a worthy idea that senators and Gov. David Ige should support.

The Case For A Task Force

Over the course of this year and before the Legislature convenes in 2017, the task force would plan and coordinate efforts to maintain Honolulu as the host site for the Pro Bowl and establish Hawaii as a site for an NFL pre-season game; look at possibilities for “world-title soccer tournaments” and competitions in mixed martial arts and “ultimate fighting,” as well as other international events at Aloha Stadium; and examine possibilities of hosting events in sports ranging from motocross, tennis, beach volleyball, sailboat races and more.

The task force would have plenty of firepower to get its work done. Members would include the governor, mayors of Honolulu, Maui, Kauai and Hawaii, the stadium authority chair and manager of Aloha Stadium, the state comptroller, the president/CEO of the Hawaii Tourism Authority and eight other leaders or appointees of elected leaders from around Hawaii.

Given the planning and coordination responsibilities being invested in the group and the fact that, at best, it might be able to conduct three quarterly meetings before next year’s legislative session, its work ought to be extended through 2017. If there are specific matters the Legislature would like it to tackle in advance of next year’s session, that work could be separated from other matters that can be focused on next year.

A sports authority might be exactly what Hawaii needs — a stand-alone commission focused exclusively on the promotion and development of Hawaii as a sports entertainment destination. But the idea hasn’t been sufficiently vetted.

We also suggest expanding the task force’s agenda to examine whether an ongoing Hawaii Sports Authority ought to be established — an idea currently embedded in House Bill 1847, the other big sports bill that passed the House last week.

A sports authority might be exactly what Hawaii needs — a stand-alone commission that focuses exclusively on the promotion and development of Hawaii as a sports entertainment destination year round. But the idea hasn’t been sufficiently vetted, a fact that became clear in the Senate when a similar bill died after former Senate President Donna Mercado Kim raised pointed questions about how much the authority might cost, what events it might pursue and what the cost-benefit ratio might be to justify the expense of a new authority.

Legitimate answers to those and other questions are important to have, yet they can’t be found in the current bill, which provides more of a history lesson on past successes in big sporting events hosted in Hawaii. If an authority is to be created, a stronger, more airtight case will have to be made for it.

The work of a sports task force over the next 20 months might provide the facts and data required to substantiate the request for an authority or to shoot the idea down. Legislators should seize the opportunity to get at that information as well as the matters already provided for in HB 2229, while setting HB 1847 aside for future consideration.