Sarah Toeaina aimed higher than the rest from the very start, as those who witnessed her first youth game in the Kent Commons League can attest.

“The hoops were lowered. I threw up the ball and it went over the backboard because my dad and I never practiced on a lower hoop,” Hawaii’s senior captain recalled.

It portended a career arc that’s still on the rise, even as she prepares to play the final home game of her Rainbow Wahine career tonight. Toeaina, a 5-foot-11 guard and one of 21 1,000-point scorers in program history, is her team’s lone outgoing upperclassman.

UH (12-16, 5-10 Big West) clinched a Big West tournament berth with a 73-64 win over UC Santa Barbara on Thursday night and will be seeded somewhere between six to eight for Tuesday’s first-round game at Cal State Fullerton. The Wahine can aid their standing by topping rival Cal Poly (16-11, 10-5) for a 10th straight senior night win.

Toeaina, motivated to send out others with success, submitted a monster game at this time a year ago to give UH its ninth straight home-finale victory. Now the latest up-and-comers look to keep it going for her.

“I look up to her in so many ways, on and off the court,” sophomore forward Kenna Woodfolk said. “I want to be a leader like her on the court. And just her work ethic, is amazing. It would be great to see her happy and send her off with a win.”

Toeaina, a four-year player and contributor on UH’s Big West championship team of 2015-16, has done it all for her team over the past two years. She has alternately been a scoring workhorse and a mentor for a younger group.

With her strong pull-up game in the mid-range and ability to draw contact, she is sixth in Big West scoring at 16.1 per game and fourth in shooting at 52.1 percent.

Toeaina, 14th in career scoring at 1,161 points, can vault up to 11th by the end of the night, as she is well within range of Ashleigh Karaitiana (1,167), Kaui Wakita (1,173) and Kim Everett (1,174).

Coach Laura Beeman called her “really the foundation of the culture of our locker room.”

“You have the spectrum of the kids who pretty much do everything right … and the kids who kind of test you. And you love them all,” Beeman said. “Sarah’s been that kid who really tries to do it right, and has done it right. Comes from a great family, a great support system.”

Toeaina, who is one-eighth native Hawaiian, is the daughter of two former UH athletes who grew up here — Andrew Toeaina (football) and the former Maile Golden (volleyball). Sarah embraced the islands as home despite growing up in Covington, Wash., where her parents are 20-year pastors.

Her father, a former Saint Louis lineman, loved basketball even over his primary sport and was a guiding hand in her development once she took to it on her own in second grade. He would always tell his middle child what he thought she needed to hear.

“One of the many things I would tell her was, as soon as you stop being teachable and pliable, is when you’re gonna go downhill,” Andrew Toeaina said. “I always tell her this: ‘I don’t care how much you accomplish, all the awards and stuff that you get — it’s when you stop being teachable. Sometimes your greatest enemy is your success.’ I’m glad she took it.”

She’s battled that success through her standout three-sport career at Kentwood High and even to this day. Sometimes that’s been painful, in a different way but just as much as the broken nasal bone injury she took back in December. (She still needs surgery after the season to properly recover.)

“Basketball was always my outlet, though, whether I needed some time away from my exam, studying, or a really hard postgame talk with my dad,” Toeaina said. “I would just lock myself in the gym and shoot the ball away.”

Toeaina hopes to channel her passion into a professional career and beyond that, a stint in sports marketing.

“As I matured within basketball and off the court, (I realized) I owe basketball a lot,” she said. “That’s why I’m going to continue to play, because I want to see how much more I can give it. Basketball has taken me to new heights. The amazing people that I’ve met just picking up a ball and putting it in a basket has been a blessing.”