Sydney Haydel stepped off the plane and into another world.

It was last summer. The Hawaii guard visited the industrial city of Dongguan, China, for a basketball coaching internship, so that she might impart her knowledge of the game to Chinese students while training for her senior season. But it also described her emotions when she arrived in Honolulu from her native Los Angeles to begin her Rainbow Wahine career in 2010.

"It was almost like deja vu," Haydel said. "It was like being in a dorm room, by myself with some bags and basketball. And that was what I felt when I came here. It was me, my dorm room and basketball with the addition of school. It felt like that all over again and it made me want to rededicate myself to what was here in Hawaii to do — just to get better at what I came here to do and perfect my craft."

She is the rare four-year player from the mainland who encountered a new culture upon her arrival, embraced the differences and stuck things out for the long haul, even through a coaching change.

The defensive stopper has been a fixture in the Wahine rotation over the past four years. The difference this season: Haydel is counted on for a little bit of everything after earning her keep solely with her back to the basket over the past three.

Haydel is the only player for UH (13-10, 7-4 Big West) to start all 23 games this season, is the team leader in steals (24), minutes per game (30.7) and, in limited attempts, 3-point efficiency (12-for-24, 50 percent). Her scoring average of 6.6 is nearly double that of last season.

With UH’s leading scorer and rebounder Kamilah Jackson possibly sidelined at least one game with a right foot injury, it falls upon complementary offensive pieces like Haydel to compensate this week for games at UC Irvine (12-12, 5-5) on Thursday and UC Davis (10-13, 5-5) on Saturday.

There’s about zero percent chance that Haydel, who was once a post player at Harvard-Westlake School, will be unprepared for the challenge. After working with 15- to 17-year-olds every day in China for six weeks, she would spend hours working on her offensive game in an NBA-quality facility.

That approach has extended to midseason.

"I think everybody knows she’s the hardest-working player on this team," Jackson said. "She works hard on our days off. … I think she’s the person that we look to when everybody’s tired."

As a junior, Haydel became the first Wahine player to receive conference recognition as Defensive Player of the Year, earning a reputation as a lockdown perimeter player despite a relative lack of statistical support.

UH coach Laura Beeman has guided Haydel since taking over the program midway through her career. While Beeman considers Haydel’s junior year her best overall work defensively, the player’s signature moment happened in nonconference play this season, when Haydel hindered talented Minnesota guard Rachel Banham in a UH overtime win. Banham finished with 24 points on 7-for-16 shooting, but that did not reflect the job Haydel did in the coach’s mind.

Beeman was supported by Haydel, one of the team’s few established returning players when Beeman took over for Dana Takahara-Dias in 2012. Inheriting a player with a defensive mind-set was even better.

"That mind-set is what sets Syd off from everybody else," Beeman said. "That I’m going to expose myself and maybe get worked through the ringer with a better player, but give it my all and help this team. It’s nice to inherit a player like that. It’s something we needed last year, because our defense was on point and people weren’t expecting such good defense from us so quickly. And Syd was a huge factor in that."

Haydel will graduate in business and is undecided on her future, be it the pursuit of a master’s degree, playing ball in an overseas league or even returning to China.

With just five regular-season games remaining, there’s still room in Haydel’s mind for improvement.

"I think we have to remain focused on getting better," she said. "At no point of the season can we be OK with where we are."