In this weekend’s meet within a meet, four Rainbow Wahine will introduce Hawaii to Big West track and field when the conference heptathlon is staged at Cal State Northridge. All four rank in the conference’s top six.

UH hopes for a memorable first impression, and a jump start into its first BWC championships next week.

UH senior Samantha Balentine, in the final weeks of a sport that has dominated the past eight years of her life, is ranked first among BWC heptathletes with 5,125 points. Senior teammate Amanda Alvarez is fourth, junior Kaleigh Morrison fifth and sophomore Zhane Santiago sixth.

Balentine also heads the Big West pack in the high jump. She ranks eighth nationally after clearing 6 feet, 1/2 inches in the midst of the heptathlon at last month’s Mondo Mid-Major Challenge, where the four UH athletes set 13 personal records. In February, Balentine came within two inches of qualifying for the NCAA Indoor Championships.

After coming up short in the high jump at the NCAA outdoor preliminaries the past three years, her focus is firmly on setting the bar higher. The high jump, and Hawaii’s 2010 NCAA high jump champion Amber Kaufman, are what brought her here from Lodi, Calif., tucked deep into the Central Valley and made infamous in the ’70s, when Creedence Clearwater Revival was "stuck in Lodi again."

"Seeing how well Amber did and the history of high jump in the program was a shining star for me …," Balentine said. "My main focus is high jump. I want to do well overall, I really want to try hard this week, but I also want to use it as another practice session for next week."

Her interest in multi events was fanned by UH coach Carmyn James, who helped transform triple jumper Annett Wichmann into a world-class heptathlete and NCAA silver medalist. Balentine stands second to Wichmann in multi events in the program’s record book, and right below Kaufman in the high jump. She also qualified for the 100-meter hurdles next week.

It took some time, but Balentine is finally at ease with the heptathlon’s relentlessness. She even finds its rhythm beneficial for her jumping and has found ways to ease her frustration in one event by "taking it out" in the next.

"Now I can leave each event and move on to the next one," she says. "After four years of doing it, I’ve gotten pretty good at blowing bad events off."

James agrees that Balentine has found a comfort zone.

"She has confidence," James says. "She’s done this a few times, so she knows what to expect and she’s confident with her performances too. … She understands all seven events and knows what she’s capable of and how to make it happen. It’s been a pleasure to work with her."

Along with multi events, Hawaii’s strength lies in field events. James’ hope next week is that the Wahine do well in the field, and the Big West is balanced enough in track events to keep them near the top.

At last year’s Western Athletic Conference championships, Balentine took third in the heptathlon and fifth in the high jump. That gave her 10 top-eight (scoring) finishes in her first three years, to go with a trio of academic all-conference honors.

She will be hurdling and jumping next weekend, when she could be walking with her graduation class. Balentine plans to take a year off before pursuing her master’s in occupational therapy.

For the next month, she will try to deal with the reality that the end of her track career is near — and help her father do the same. He is an avid fan and makes many of her meets, including the last one, where he joked that he needed to "adopt another kid or I won’t know what to do with all my time."

Balentine expects the lifestyle change to be "kinda shocking."

"What am I going to do now?" she says. "I’ve been spending hours on the track every day. It’s been my life the last eight years so this is definitely a wake-up call."

The first four heptathlon events will be today, with the final three Saturday. The rest of the championship events are May 10-11.