Day 1 of Rainbow Wahine volleyball turned into Volleyball 101.

While the sun was still on its way up, 20 players were on their way out. They gathered at Stan Sheriff Center before 6:30 a.m. Wednesday for the first day of practice.

What they found was an introduction to Hawaii volleyball made necessary by seven new faces and coach Dave Shoji’s Olympic-inspired desire to have his team focus on "making the tough plays look easy."

The opening hours of the 2012 season, which officially begins Aug. 24 against Albany, were a sweaty succession of drills run in silence, with agonizingly small corrections.

"No matter how old you are," said setter Mita Uiato, "you have to go back to technique."

Shoji started from the beginning, as in the first step. He went over the relative detriments of the split-step, a move tennis players practice religiously to return serve but Shoji believes takes too long. "Or," he told his players, "tennis players are just better at it than volleyball players."

He wants them in position, both feet on the ground, when the ball is hit. He wants their weight precisely balanced so they can play every ricochet. He warned them never to backpedal, always to turn their body.

Shoji altered the angle of blockers’ bodies and fingers by fractions of an inch. He told his players to stay on their feet and "pursue" balls unless they absolutely had to dive on the floor.

Then the 65-year-old coach, in the opening hours of his 38th season, demonstrated the "collapse dig" — just what it sounds like — more than once.

Transfer Sarah Mendoza compared the demonstration favorably to what she saw a year ago from Irvine Valley coach Tom Pestolesi, who played for Shoji at UH in the 1980s. He helped Mendoza get into the program that was her first choice from the time she played ‘Iolani’s Ann Kang Tournament in high school.

After talking up the Hawaii coaching staff and volleyball community, Pestolesi gave Mendoza, a 5-foot-5 defensive specialist, one final word of advice.

"He told me," said Mendoza, whose mother lived here, "to work my butt off."

That is what the first few weeks of double-day practices are all about. Combined with Shoji’s energized emphasis on making irregular plays on a regular basis, there is no time to rest, mind or weary body.

"He wants us to make it more simple," Mendoza explains. "Minimalize all of our moves. Just get there, be set, not have a whole bunch of movement. And be smart about playing, definitely."

Hawaii lost three starters (Chanteal Satele, Brittany Hewitt and Kanani Danielson) from last season. This team will look drastically different. It might not look great through a preseason that includes Stanford the first week, Cal the second and defending NCAA champion UCLA the third.

All were in the top 16 in last year’s final ranking, along with Hawaii, which finished fifth. That will be a stretch early on.

"I don’t think we’ll be very good early," Shoji said, "but we need to keep improving to be a factor later in the year. Last year we were really good early. There were no question marks. We were solid from the start. We were good already, we just had to maintain it. This year we could be very average early, but we have a lot of upside. We need to improve."

A fraction of an inch a day, a fraction of an inch a play.

"(Volunteer assistant) Kaleo (Baxter) likes to tell us to get 1 percent better every day," says Uiato, "so that’s pretty much what we’re working on — getting better every day."

Notes

» Freshman Katie Speiler, who suffered a fractured toe nearly three weeks ago, did not participate in the first practice.

» Tickets are available online for this year’s NCAA championship. The final four will be Dec. 13 and 15 at KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, Ky. Two-day all-sessions passes begin at $50, plus a surcharge of more than $10, at ticketmaster.com.

» Dave Shoji’s sons, Kawika and Erik, will both play professional volleyball this fall in Germany. Kawika, an ‘Iolani graduate, returns to his championship team in Berlin. Erik, a Punahou graduate, will play for a team in Leipzig, 2 hours south. Both were All-Americans at Stanford and started on the Cardinal’s 2010 NCAA championship team.