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The University of Hawaii women’s basketball team is playing a nonconference schedule of opponents who had a .628 winning percentage in 2011-12.

The men’s team, meanwhile, has a nonconference schedule that, so far, reflects a .443 winning percentage.

The Rainbow Wahine will play four teams that made the NCAA tournament, including defending national champion Baylor.

The men’s team, awaiting Hawaiian Airlines Diamond Head Classic and Bracket Buster pairings and, possibly a backyard Division II foe, has one NCAA Tournament participant, Nevada-Las Vegas, and will likely end up with, at most, two.

The men will ease into their season with the first three regular-season opponents having a collective 28-65 record. The women will leap right in, challenged early by four teams that went a combined 103-36.

Rarely, it seems, have UH’s two basketball teams embarked upon such disparate paths in the same season to prepare for conference play.

As UH works toward its inaugural Big West Conference season in January, the women have to navigate Murderer’s Row and the men negotiate, well, something more akin to Misdemeanor Row to get there.

You would think the rebuilding Rainbow Wahine, featuring a new head coach and coming off an 11-19 season, would have the more pliable schedule and the men, with a third-year head coach and coming off a 16-16 finish, would have the much more challenging gauntlet.

But you’d be wrong. Two of the women’s first four games are against Baylor (40-0) and Stanford (35-2), teams that finished Nos. 1 and 3 in the final Associated Press Top 25 poll. And, as an added bonus, the national player of the year, 6-foot, 8-inch Brittney Griner, is back for Baylor.

If the Rainbow Wahine don’t win their Nov. 9 regular-season opener against San Francisco, that first victory could be awhile in coming.

You can bet this isn’t how new Rainbow Wahine coach Laura Beeman would have drawn it up. But, then, the schedule is, maybe, 10 percent of her doing after coming aboard in late March. The vast majority of the schedule was inherited from her predecessor, Dana Takahara-Dias, who wasn’t shy about taking on the big girls, North Carolina, Texas, Florida State, Virginia, etc., and booking more for the future.

UH has had the opportunity to pick from a Who’s Who of opponents because women’s basketball is less tied to TV than the men and because marquee Bowl Championship Series conference programs have the wherewithal to go where they please. And the prospect of bonus games in paradise is inviting.

The men, meanwhile, have the Diamond Head field picked for them by ESPN and then are free to fill in the pukas as it suits them. This time, after the wholesale offseason turnover and existing home-and-home series with UNLV and Illinois, an abuser friendly approach apparently suited them.

Hopefully, 2013-14 will help both UH teams find a more equitable medium.

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