The University of Hawaii women’s volleyball team is set to take the next step in its training as it advances toward what it hopes will be a spring-semester season.

The past couple of weeks, the Rainbow Wahine were in the eight-hours-a-week acclimation phase — four hours in the gym, four hours working on strength and conditioning. Beginning this week, they will be allowed up to 20 hours each week for team-related activities, such as on-court sessions, conditioning drills and meetings.

“It will be kind of like we’re in season,” coach Robyn Ah Mow said of the weekly training activities.

The collective wish is the season, which was postponed from its late-August start, might begin in early 2021. Ah Mow said she hopes the regular season would not be limited to only Big West opponents. “We’d like to have a nonconference schedule,” she said.

Ah Mow said the tentative target is for a mid-January start to the season. But she indicated plans might depend “on where our island and our state are with this whole COVID stuff. That’s what I keep telling (the players). It all depends with what’s going on each week, each month. … You have to go with the flow, and whatever happens, you’ve got to deal with it and keep going.”

The Wahine have operated under what-if possibilities for seven months. “When this (pandemic) started in March, and it kept going, I knew (the season) wasn’t going to happen in August,” Ah Mow said. “There was no way it was happening in August. But we were just crossing our fingers they could possibly push it to spring.”

Ah Mow said the players kept fit during unsupervised workouts. When they received notice to begin conditioning drills in August, the players began to report. “We had to wait for Anna (Kiraly),” Ah Mow said of the middle from Hungary. “She was coming from international, so that one took a little bit longer with her visa and stuff to get done. She came in a little bit later. For the most part, everyone was here from the beginning in late August.”

The NCAA allows only football and basketball teams to have team-organized practices during the summer. “The first time (volleyball coaches) can have access to (their players) is when they come back for summer school,” Ah Mow said. “But it’s not us (coaches) who have access. They can work out with the strength coach. But that’s about it. Anything indoor is voluntary work. It’s way different from basketball and football.”

Ah Mow said on-court workouts began two weeks ago. She said the focus has been on skill work and maintaining safety measures. Ah Mow said there is a limit to how many players can be on the court at the same time. She said everyone in the gym wears a mask.

“I get it,” Ah Mow said of adhering to safety protocol and social distancing. “We want to keep practicing. We want sports to happen.… The rules keep the athletes safe, us safe.”

Ah Mow said even when the practice hours expand, the Wahine will stick to individual and small-group work for a while.

“We don’t need to do six on six right now,” she said. “Our first game isn’t until January. We’ve got to get the girls back into shape and touching the ball, so more reps, more skills, and reps.”