It is going on 31 years since the University of Hawaii last won an NCAA team championship in anything.
Well, the ones it was able to hold onto, anyway.
What appears to be one of its best opportunities to end that drought is being written in the sand, where the Rainbow Wahine beach volleyball team remains a solid third in the American Volleyball Coaches Association poll.
(Rainbow Wahine water polo is ranked fifth and men’s volleyball sixth after reaching as high as No. 2 this season.)
CHAMPIONSHIP ROLL CALL
(National championship UH teams)
NCAA
>> 2002 Men’s volleyball (later vacated due to ineligible player).
>> 1987 Wahine volleyball
>> 1983 Wahine volleyball
>> 1982 Wahine volleyball
Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women
>> 1979 Wahine volleyball
Inter-collegiate Sailing Association
>> 2004 Coed sailing
>> 2001 Wahine sailing
Source: UH.
The SandBows are 23-3 and cruising along on a school-record 18-match win streak entering Saturday and Sunday’s Queen’s Cup tournament against Washington, Utah and Loyola Marymount at Queen’s Beach.
It is one of the last stops before the postseason and a run at what would be the school’s first NCAA team championship since the Rainbow Wahine’s indoor NCAA volleyball team title of 1987.
The Rainbow Warriors won the 2002 men’s volleyball title but were forced to vacate it due to the use of an ineligible player.
The only other national team titles — coming in the Inter-collegiate Sailing Association — were won by the Rainbow Wahine in 2001 and a UH coed team in 2004. The NCAA does not sponsor a sailing national championship.
But the NCAA’s adoption of beach volleyball as a sport in 2012 and the sponsoring of a national championship beginning in 2016 has allowed the ’Bows to aim high.
“Since we took over this program (a national title) has been the No. 1 goal, and, I think, an achievable one, so we talk about it,” fourth-year head coach Jeff Hall said.
Beach volleyball is one of the few remaining sports where a school not in a well-heeled Power Five Conference, such as UH, can still have a shot at an NCAA championship.
In some ways it is almost like the 1970s and 1980s, the early years after Title IX, when UH and some of its Big West sisters — Long Beach State, Pacific, etc. — were top-10 fixtures in the volleyball polls and familiar faces at the NCAA finals.
That may change in time, but for the moment, at least, the fast-emerging sport of beach volleyball, where 72 schools now field teams on the top level, is wide open. And, UH, with eight of 12 starters back from a 29-9 team that finished third behind USC and Pepperdine, has its sights set.
“At the start of the year we had goal-setting by the team, we came up with kind of a mantra and we’ve focused ourselves on what it takes to be a championship team,” Hall said. “But we’re a bit old school in that we just kind of take it one thing at a time.”
UH loaded up its early, preconference schedule with top teams, going 13-3 vs. Top 20 teams, including 2-0 vs. USC and 1-2 vs. UCLA, and made an East Coast swing. “It doesn’t do us much good to play a bunch of matches against (Cal State) Bakersfield and Sacramento State,” Hall said.
Hall said, “Our first goal is to get (up) in the polls, then, to win the Big West Challenge, which we did last week, the Big West tournament and, then, obviously the NCAA tournament (May 4-6 in Gulf Shores, Ala.).”
The Rainbow Wahine’s top pair, Emily Maglio and Ka’iwi Schucht, have won a school-record-matching 14 consecutive matches. Morgan Martin and Lea Monkhouse have won 16 of their last 17 matches.
“Quite frankly, my kids are highly motivated,” Hall said. “And, it doesn’t take a ton of stuff to get them motivated, they do it themselves. They are intrinsically (driven).”
A shot at school history, delivering what would be UH’s first NCAA team championship in 31 years, can do that.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
