For first time since 1995, UH volleyball will be an underdog

There is a rarely used, practically dust-covered term that the University of Hawaii Rainbow Wahine volleyball team hasn’t had affixed to it in starting a Big West Conference season in a generation.

It is “underdog.”

For the first time since 1995 the Rainbow Wahine found themselves in something other than their accustomed position as automatic preseason favorite Tuesday when the coaches poll had them second behind Cal Poly.

Clearly this is going to take some getting used to.

You’ve got to go back a ways, back, back, back… to when current UH head coach Robyn Ah Mow-Santos and assistant Angelica Ljungqvist were juniors in the still-new Stan Sheriff Center, to find a point when somebody, anybody, in the Big West (Pacific in that case) was picked over them in the then 10-member conference.

Not a total surprise that it happened this year, perhaps, since the Mustangs won both head-to-head matches — each 3-2 — last year to go undefeated (16-0) and take the Big West title over the 14-2 ’Bows.

Though they did lose three first-team all-conference players, a couple — the Van Winden sisters, Adlee and Torrey — return. Enough, apparently, despite three experienced senior transfer additions for UH, to earn Cal Poly five of the nine first-place votes now that Emily Maglio and Savanah Kahakai have departed Manoa.

But it is still a little jarring that the perception of UH’s once-tight grip on the Big West — which the Rainbow Wahine have largely ruled with an iron fist since its 2012 return from more than a decade of domination in the Western Athletic Conference — has slipped.

Two years ago, for example, UH was the unanimous favorite in the Big West. And since its return to the Big West six years ago, the Rainbow Wahine are 89-9 in conference. In 17 overall seasons of Big West play, both pre- and post-WAC, UH has historically played the bully on the block at 254-40.

In 1995, the last time UH wasn’t picked by coaches to win the conference, it is worth remembering that Big West volleyball was a vastly different animal than it is viewed as today. Back then, it was a beast nationally and an annual contributor to NCAA championship final-four fields.

That year four teams — UH, Long Beach State, UC Santa Barbara and Pacific — were in the American Volleyball Coaches Association Top 20 poll from season’s start to finish. Anything more than one would be considered remarkable today, when the AVCA preseason poll is scheduled to be released.

If the Rainbow Wahine have a bone to pick with those who don’t see them as favorites — and you would hope they do — then, perhaps, Ah Mow-Santos and and Ljungqvist can provide some historical perspective and well-applied inspiration on the subject.

Because it was that 1995 team that they helped lead that showed the coaches the error of their ways. The Rainbow Wahine rolled through conference at 18-0, many of the matches of the exclamation point uno-dos-adios variety, in a 31-1 season that marked UH’s last in the Big West for 16 seasons.

UH isn’t planning on going anywhere now and, indeed, the mission is to show that they still belong back on top of the conference.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.