It isn’t by coincidence that the Hawaii Rainbow Wahine basketball team plays road games around Christmas.

Coach Laura Beeman schedules the games to give her mainland players a cheaper way to get home for the holidays, saving them each several hundred dollars and lessening the disadvantage in recruiting.

But now, as conferences move toward enacting a “cost of attendance” stipend for scholarship players, UH, the NCAA’s most geographically challenged member, figures to need more than just akamai scheduling.

Under pressure from lawsuits and public opinion, the well-heeled so-called “Power Five” conferences — Pac-12, Big Ten, Big 12, Southeastern and Atlantic Coast — are pushing for stipends that would help close the gap between what athletes get in their scholarship checks and what it actually costs them to attend school beyond books, room and board.

This week directors of the Mountain West and Big West, the two conferences that the majority of UH’s 21 teams call home, will wade deeper into the issue in annual meetings or conference calls.

“That (stipend) train is on the tracks right now and we all have to address it — sooner rather than later,” said Dennis Farrell, Big West Commissioner.

At UH, that “cost of attendance” stipend, taking in miscellaneous expenses and travel costs, is currently estimated at $3,241 per year, meaning a price tag of upwards of $600,000 annually.

UH said 332 of its 475 athletes are on some form of scholarship, including 145 on full scholarships. While some sports, such as football and women’s volleyball, award full scholarships by NCAA dictate, others, such as baseball and men’s volleyball, award partials. For example, baseball’s 11.7 scholarships can be spread among more than 20 players, with some receiving one-quarter scholarships.

According to proposals currently under discussion in Division I, players receiving full scholarships would be eligible for full stipends and those receiving fractional awards would get a corresponding fraction of the stipend.

Funding them at Power Five conference schools poses few problems. Each Pac-12 school took in $19 million — or more — in conference disbursements for the just-completed 2013-14 school year.

In the have-not conferences, such as the Mountain West, where the payouts are less than $3 million, and Big West, where they are far less, there is considerable consternation about where the money will come from. That is, if it comes at all.

Left largely unspoken but not overlooked is that schools that award stipends stand to have a recruiting advantage over those that don’t.

“If you are competing against one of the lower-level Pac-12 teams for a player that you might have gotten a year or two ago, what chance do you have if that school is now giving out $3,000 stipends and you can’t?” a conference official said.

But it isn’t just Pac-12 schools.

“If Loyola Marymount and Pepperdine (of the West Coast Conference) are awarding them in basketball, what then?” the official said.

In addition, coaches suggest UH could have a harder time keeping some of the homegrown athletes it now retains due to family finances if mainland schools offer stipends that help underwrite travel and UH doesn’t.  

Farrell and his Mountain West counterpart, Craig Thompson, have said it is likely there will be a “permissive” response by conference directors, allowing member schools to determine how much — if any — they wish to commit to stipends, not a one-size-fits-all mandate for the entire membership.

In addition, they say, schools will compute the “cost of attendance” differently. Estimates have varied from $2,000 to $4,000. 

“We’re totally in favor of student-athlete welfare improvement benefits. It is just something that we would have to figure out how we afford and how we fund it — whether through various other cuts or challenges or dropping programs or fundraising to a new level and telling our constituents, ‘this is the cost of playing at this level,’” Thompson told the Idaho Statesman newspaper.

Among the possible options, officials say, are extending stipends to all sports, doing it for selected sports or, perhaps, even just a handful of athletes within Title IX constraints.

For example, some officials say, on the men’s side perhaps just the football and men’s basketball teams might get stipends as well as an equal number of female athletes spread across several sports.

“If we are going to do this, then we have to do this with a fundamental fairness, although some people would argue about that,” UH athletic director Ben Jay said. “If not, then who are you going to give them to? I mean, really? How do you give it to the soccer team but not the tennis players?”

At UH,  Jay said the bigger issue becomes “How much can we afford? Because it does add an expense and we’re not capable of paying for ourselves the way it is right now.” 

At UH, “until there is a commitment to saying ‘This is what we’re going to do’ to make sure that we can fund our athletics properly, I don’t know if the conversations about the stipend are even appropriate,” Beeman said. “It seems like, here we go, adding an additional cost when there are already lots of conversations going on right now about being $2 million in the hole.”

UH projects a $2 million deficit in its $33 million budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30, the 10th deficit year in the past 12.

Speaking specifically for her team, Beeman said there are things she believes UH could do that would go further — and, maybe, cost less — than implementing stipends.

“If (recruits) come over here and our facilities are on point, if we’ve got a great weight room, a training table and a beautifully maintained campus and pay for summer school, they won’t even ask me about the stipend because they are going to be dying to come here because of how unique the University of Hawaii is in relation to a lot of mainland schools (UH is recruiting against),” Beeman said.

But, she said, “We can’t keep up with the (lower-level) Pac-12 teams because of the facilities. It is not because of the support staff — they do a wonderful job — it is the money to maintain our (facilities). If our facilities matched the beaches and their beauty, kids would come here and we wouldn’t be able to keep them away.”

Beeman said, “Let’s do those little things that go so much further than a stipend. That, to me, is a more important conversation than the stipend.”