In its 43 years, only one golfer has defended a title in the University of Hawaii’s John Burns Intercollegiate tournament.

It was not Stanford teammates Notah Begay and Tiger Woods, who won back-to-back in the mid-1990s.

It’s not Bobby Clampett, Steve Pate, Andrew Magee, Ryan Moore or Bo Van Pelt, who also catapulted onto the PGA Tour.

It’s not Skye Inakoshi, who became the only Rainbow to win the Burns in 2016. Local boys Justin Keiley (2014, BYU) and Donald Hurter (1984, New Mexico) never repeated.

But today at a Wailua Municipal layout stretched to 7,000 yards along the Pacific Ocean, Texas A&M’s Chandler Phillips is back on Kauai to go for a three-peat.

Numbers will fill the air at Wailua, which hosted the second Burns Intercollegiate in 1978 and has been home to three USGA National Public Links Championships.

The Burns came back to Wailua in 2014. This year, it will also be the site of the Big West championships at the end of April.

That makes this week a warm-up of massive proportions for the Rainbows.

There are eight top-50 teams on Kauai, including second-ranked Duke, four-time champ UNLV (No. 35) and three-time winners Brigham Young (22) and Arizona (45). Defending champion Texas A&M is ranked 20th.

Then there are Hawaii and Big West rivals Cal State Northridge, Long Beach State, UC Irvine and UC Santa Barbara. If any are in contention this week, against some of the best in the country, they will be favored in April.

That is precisely what former governor John Burns was hoping for when he pushed to bring professional golf and other sports to Hawaii, and upgrade UH athletics.

Burns died in 1975 and this tournament was founded soon after, so Hawaii golfers could be inspired by playing against the best.

This week, UH coach Ronn Miyashiro is looking for improvement in the midst of inspiration.

“This week is a two-fold approach,” he says. “To try to score well and compete with a very good tournament field that includes over half of the Big West teams. Second, to get in some quality knowledge of Wailua which we can use later in the year at the Big West championship.”

The Rainbows had a few memorable individual performances in the fall, most notably by the Justins from Maui — Ngan and Arcano. The sophomores led Hawaii in all five fall tournaments.

Cameron Kaneko, one of two UH seniors along with Kapaa graduate Bryden Salvador, had the team’s best showing at a challenging Amer Ari Invitational earlier this month.

That was co-hosted by UH Hilo and Manoa, which will host five events this year. Miyashiro hopes his players get better at each one.

“I think the best thing about this team is that they come in every day with the mind-set of working hard and getting better,” he says. “They all know that the key to our team success is that we will all have to be able to post scores that put us in contention every week.

“Realistically that is even par or better. If we are counting 74 and 75, that won’t cut it. So there has been a large emphasis put on making more birdies, eliminating big numbers, and even par or better numbers in scoring this spring.”

It is what John Burns would have wanted, and what Chandler Phillips has accomplished the past two years at Wailua, shooting a combined 28 under.

The senior set a school record last month, getting to 19 under to win the Arizona Intercollegiate by eight shots. It was the All-American’s seventh collegiate victory, another school record.

Last week he was named to the Ben Hogan Award Watch List. The award is given annually to the top men’s college golfer for all collegiate and amateur competitions during a 12-month period (June to May).

Miyashiro would like his players to find that kind of confidence.

“It’s the mental side and gaining that confidence that each player has to conquer that to me is our greatest obstacle,” he says. “That I hope will be accomplished by continuing to emphasize lower scoring and positive results in tournament play. That is when it all counts.”

The Rainbow Wahine are in Phoenix this weekend for the Grand Canyon Invitational. They host their 34th annual Dr. Donnis Thompson Invitational March 12-13 at Kaneohe Klipper, then go to Waikoloa for the Anuenue Spring Break Classic. The women’s Big West championships, hosted by Cal State Northridge, are April 15-17 in Moorpark, Calif.

Sophomore Sahara Washington leads UH with a scoring average of 75.94, followed by senior Kaci Masuda (76.06) and junior Megan Ratcliffe (76.25).