Hawaiian Airlines becomes first official jersey patch sponsor for the University of Hawai’i

HONOLULU – History long in the making.

In a college sports world that continues to search for new streams of revenue, the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa tapped into a longtime friend of UH athletics on Tuesday afternoon as the school announced that Hawaiian Airlines would be the first-ever jersey patch sponsor for the Rainbow Warrior football team.

“We’ve been partners with Hawaiian Airlines for many years [and] they’ve taken care of our student-athletes in a way that goes beyond just a traditional partnership,” Athletics Director Matt Elliott said during the partnership reveal at Clarence T.C. Ching Complex on Tuesday. “Something new has happened in college sports with the advent of us being able to add jersey patches … There was no better partner for us to move forward with the very first jersey patch partnership here at the University of Hawai’i than Hawaiian Airlines.”

Less than a month into the year, the NCAA announced that Division I teams would be able to place up to two additional commercial patches of no more than 4 square inches on uniforms and apparel for preseason and regular-season games beginning on August 1, 2026. The decision was made to allow schools and conferences to “set standards that reflect their values and serve their unique needs” in the challenging, expensive world of college sports.

The announcement comes just days prior to Hawai’i’s 2026 season opener on the road against Stanford. The iconic Pualani logo of Hawaiian Airlines will make its official debut on national television on Saturday.

While the parties declined to share financial details of the agreement, it was revealed that Hawaiian Airlines would continue as the exclusive charter airline for the Rainbow Warrior football team during the 2026 season.

Hawai’i plays on the road on six separate occasions in 2026, trekking across the continental United States from California to Texas to Illinois and everywhere in between. Hawaiian Airlines will charter each leg for all six road trips for the Rainbow Warriors.

As part of the deal, Hawaiian Airlines also plans to engage with UH fans through game day activations, promotions and digital content with student-athletes.

“As everything we know, this is the first partnership between a college athletics department and an airline in the country,” Elliott shared. “This partnership was very important to us to be specific to football.”

Hawai’i AD Matt Elliott addresses the media after announcing a historic jersey patch deal between the Rainbow Warrior football program and Hawaiian Airlines. | Photo Credit: Ku’ulei Agbayani, HSRN

Elliott reiterated that the jersey patch sponsorship with Hawaiian Airlines was unique to the football program at UH and that the school will have different sponsors or partnerships for the jersey patches of other sports.

“You’ve seen at other schools maybe one jersey patch for an entire department. We didn’t think that was right for us,” he said. “What we thought was right for us was to try to find the right partner for each team and match those up. So, that’s what we did and what we pursued.”

The current iteration of the sponsorship contract runs as a one-year deal, which Elliott said will be the case for all jersey patches for UH during the 2026-27 athletics season.

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