Hawaii is treating this one less like a road trip and more like a commando raid.

The Rainbow Wahine basketball team, already well-versed in travel this season with three separate nonconference road swings, arrived in Los Angeles on Friday evening with a quick strike in mind for today’s 3 p.m. Hawaii time Big West game at UC Riverside.

"It’s ‘road trip lite’ as far as getting there and playing and coming home," UH coach Laura Beeman said of the rare one-game trip. "Probably a little more difficult in terms of, I don’t know how many of our road trips we land so late in the afternoon and turn around and play the next day."

UH (7-7, 1-1 BWC) went 2-4 in six nonconference mainland games, a relatively high number as Beeman looked to ready her team for postseason excursions.

"Honestly, we don’t make a big deal of traveling," she said. "I think Grand Canyon (their last road game on Dec. 23, a 54-51 loss) was tough just because, last road trip right before Christmas, right after finals. That’s what made that tough. Other than that, we haven’t lost because we’ve been on the road. We’ve lost because we played really good opponents, or we’ve just not played well."

Riverside (4-12, 0-3) cannot be considered a good opponent. The Highlanders have lost nine straight overall.

But UH will have to contend with guard Brittany Crain, the conference’s leading scorer at 19.6 points per game. Crain hasn’t scored fewer than 20 points or sat out a single minute in three Big West games so far.

She put up 37 points in a 90-80 win at Santa Clara back in November.

UH will be on guard for another letdown. It was staggered to open conference play with a 78-74 overtime loss to Cal Poly, in which the Wahine failed to protect a four-point lead in the last 11 seconds of regulation.

The Wahine rediscovered their identity in a 54-44 home win over Cal State Northridge on Sunday, in which they dominated the backboards to snap a three-game losing streak.

"The mentality is to play like how we did against Northridge, as a team," junior point guard Morgan Mason said. "When we play as a team and we’re all on the same page, then we can do really good things, as you saw in the Northridge game."

Beeman wants her team to remember what it felt like after the Cal Poly game for the rest of the season, and play hard to the final buzzer.

"I mean, that’s always going to be on our shoulder," said junior wing Ashleigh Karaitiana, who has shifted to a bench-energizer role of late.

"We definitely should have won, but we didn’t. … We just have to keep addressing those (issues), keep fixing what we need to do and execute our stuff."

After a quiet game against Northridge, UH senior forward Kamilah Jackson is down to sixth in the conference in scoring (16.1 ppg) but remains in second in rebounding at 10.1.

Freshman point guard Briana Harris is expected to miss her third straight game with an ankle injury.