By the time Lahainaluna’s Milika Taufa settled on a college to attend, she had earned more than 20 Division I basketball offers.

Teams including Washington and UCLA were very interested in adding a hard-nosed bruiser such as Taufa to toughen up their squads.

Humbled by every college who offered, Taufa just had a peculiar rule when it came time to decide where to go.

"I wanted to go really far away from Hawaii," she said. "I wanted to experience the cold and especially snow."

That narrowed her window to a group of schools in the Midwest, but all it took was one trip for Taufa to figure out where to spend the next four years of her life.

"Indiana was my first (official) visit and when I came here it was a done deal," she said. "I fell in love with everything immediately and the other thing was my dad could only go on one trip. He couldn’t go to the other ones and in high school I didn’t want to go to all these other places by myself, so I came here."

So there was an aspect of luck involved in Indiana getting Taufa’s commitment, but the decision has proved to be a good one.

Now a senior, Taufa has played all four years at Indiana, starting 20 games as a junior. This season, she’s seen her minutes nearly cut in half, from the career-high 19.4 minutes a game she played last season to 11.2.

Is she complaining? "Not at all," she says. Not with how the team is performing.

After going 26-63 over the past three years, the Hoosiers are off to a 14-1 start this year.

In fact, they won 14 straight to climb to No. 22 in the rankings before losing to Ohio State last weekend.

While Taufa’s minutes have decreased, she’s the most efficient she’s ever been, shooting 56.4 percent from the field and averaging one rebound every three minutes or so.

"We’re having a lot of fun now as a team and I think that’s something different from before," Taufa said. "We knew we had a young team and us seniors had to reach out and teach the (freshmen) how to listen and do things how they’re done, but you can tell they’ve listened and now we’re so close, we know what each other is doing (on the floor) and it shows."

Despite the loss to the Buckeyes, Indiana is still off to its best start since 1975 and begins a span of three games in five days tonight with a road game at Wisconsin.

The Hoosiers were one of the last four teams to be undefeated this season and the program had never gotten off to a 14-0 start before this year.

"I’ve been waiting for this for so long," Taufa said. "We finally have a group together that is really good."

Despite standing out as one the rare players in the Midwest from the state of Hawaii, Taufa has grown a lot more comfortable in her surroundings.

She wasn’t always the one layered in clothing wearing uggs to keep her feet warm.

Indiana suffered through one of its coldest winters in history when Taufa was a freshman.

The concept of layering was completely foreign to her. All she had was a simple jacket from back home.

"It was so funny because the first time I saw snow, I saw this white stuff coming down and I was like, ‘What is this?’ and my friends were like, ‘Really?’ " she said. "I had these shoes that did nothing because my feet would just start to freeze."

It took a while getting used to it, but nowadays, she’s as layered up as anyone else walking around the Indiana campus.

"I’m a pro now," she said.