"Turn right …" the rental car’s global positioning system shrilly commanded, and the driver, Laura Beeman, laughed over her cell phone.

"I’m in Denver for a working final-four visit and the car is giving me directions," Beeman said Friday.

One week into Beeman’s tenure as the University of Hawaii’s women’s basketball coach, GPS assistance comes in handy for somebody who has covered so much ground and still has plenty more to go.

Her "whirlwind" — as Beeman refers to it — has been a blur of travel, recruiting, talking to prospective staff members, preparing to move and wrapping up loose ends at USC.

Yet, for the frenetic pace, Beeman is fortunate among UH women’s head basketball coaches: she is on the job weeks in advance of national letter of intent day.

April 11 is the first day that recruits can sign binding commitments with colleges, and neither of Beeman’s two most-recent predecessors came on board within a month of theirs.

For all the controversy the fast-break changing of the guard atop Rainbow Wahine hoops generated, it has given Beeman a fighting chance on signing day. What she makes of the 11th-hour appointment remains to be seen, of course, but the opportunity is not insignificant for a program that has gone five years without a winning season.

When athletic director Jim Donovan abruptly fired Dana Takahara-Dias shortly after the season-ending defeat in the Western Athletic Conference tournament in Las Vegas in the Orleans Arena tunnel leading to the locker room — not on the floor as initially reported — the swiftness of the change and same-day posting of the vacancy were surprising.

Regrettable to be sure. Speedy and indelicate, perhaps. More streamlined than many hires at UH over the years, definitely. But it allowed UH to start the clock on the cumbersome one week waiting period before the search committee could even begin screening applications.

And, for once, UH did not get tied up in bureaucratic red tape and lose ground to so-called peer institutions that would also shortly be shopping for new coaches.

No small consideration in the case of Beeman, who might have had a shot among three others closer to her San Bernardino, Calif., home: UC Irvine, Loyola Marymount and Fresno State. By the time the first two opened or got rolling, Beeman had already emerged as a leading candidate and eventual unanimous choice for the UH job and was on the way here for an in-person interview. When Fresno State opened she had just been announced as UH’s new hire.

At her introductory press conference, Beeman acknowledged she had checked into other openings. "We can speculate about ‘what if … ,’ but I know once she got over there and met the committee, the people, she was drawn to Hawaii," said Carla Hauser, a former Cal State Northridge coach who first suggested Beeman check out the UH opening. "She felt like family already. That was very important for her."

Said Beeman on Friday, "all I know is that I’m happy to be where I am as the coach of the University of Hawaii."

Wherever the GPS takes her.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com.