Of all the college basketball teams in the state — and we’re talking eight of them — the University of Hawaii Rainbow Wahine could have easily been voted least likely to still be playing.
They are, in fact, the only ones.
Which is saying something for a team that started the season 1-7 and whose New Year began at a less-than-promising 4-10.
Only two previous Rainbow Wahine teams started as badly, and both of them — the 1981-82 and 2008-09 squads — finished pretty much the way they started at 8-18 and 8-23.
Yet, here the current version is, Women’s NIT-bound for a first-round game at Saint Mary’s on Friday.
They would undoubtedly prefer to be packing something more glossy than a 15-16 record, but this is one of those exceedingly rare cases where a sub-.500 mark can be more of a badge of honor than something requiring an apology. It attests to how they finished the regular season, not how they started. How they came together down the stretch, not how they unraveled.
“Did any of us expect it to happen?’ ” coach Laura Beeman said. “I think we knew it could happen. We just didn’t know if it would.”
The WNIT usually requires at least a .500 mark to claim a space in its 64-team field, but the tournament recognized that what the Rainbow Wahine had going was something laudable.
Otherwise, it would have been the standard call to have issued the invitation to UC Riverside, which had a 17-15 record. But the Highlanders lost two of three games to UH and the Rainbow Wahine were on the upswing.
The Rainbow Wahine were preseason picks to finish sixth in the nine-team conference and surely could have been headed in that direction. If not before Valentine’s Day, then even more likely when it was announced last month that the versatile 6-foot, 2-inch junior forward Makenna Woodfolk, their leading scorer (10.7 points per game) and rebounder (5.2), would miss the final six games and tournament due to pregnancy.
If they had been looking for an excuse to say “this just isn’t our year,” that was one on a platter.
Instead, the Rainbow Wahine found ways within the players who remained to pick up the considerable slack and secure a tie for second place in the Big West Conference, get to the tournament championship game and, for a half, maybe even shock themselves with the appearance of being NCAA tournament-bound.
“We weren’t even supposed to be there, that’s why I’m so incredibly proud of these (players),” Beeman said. “We had a great first half (of the game against UC Davis) and they had a little bit better second half, that’s what it came down to.”
The subterranean depths of the season were plumed in a 72-46 loss at UC Davis on Feb. 23 — four days after the Woodfolk announcement — a more lopsided defeat than the one (81-59) suffered against Stanford.
“We knew we had to get the chemistry (back) — and we did,” Beeman said.
“We had a week before we played Fullerton and I felt like at those practices the kids said, ‘We’re not going to let another blip on the radar defeat us.’ They locked down even tighter. We just needed time.”
And, just in time, they reeled off four consecutive victories, to snare a share of second place and get to the tournament final.
Beeman said, “I believe it was a combination of players that said, ‘We’re missing 10 points and a certain number of rebounds and we’ve got to go find it,’ so they did.”
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
