When the Stan Sheriff Center opened its doors in 1994, the University of Hawaii gloriously hung four national championship banners in the rafters and envisioned adding more in the future.

The wait for a fifth is closing in on a quarter-century now.

Fact is national team championships are increasingly hard to come by in any sport these days not only for UH, but for most of their peers, the teams from outside the Power Five conferences.

Which is a large part of why the NCAA Men’s Volleyball Championships on May 2-4 in Long Beach, Calif., where the Rainbow Warriors (27-2) hold the No. 1 seed, take on added importance.

The last NCAA team title UH held, the 2002 men’s volleyball championship, was theirs for just over 15 months before the NCAA ordered it vacated in 2003 because the Rainbow Warriors were judged to have used a player with professional experience in violation of the rules.

Soon after, the special-ordered and proudly hung banner was quietly taken down. And no other has been forthcoming.

The only team titles UH has earned since then were on the water from the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association, where Hawaii won the 2001 women’s championship and the 2004 coed crown.

Over the past decade college athletics has undergone huge stratification whereby the football and men’s and women’s basketball titles are out of the reach of all but the top teams from the most well-heeled conferences. And championships in most other NCAA-sponsored sports, including once wide-open women’s volleyball, softball and baseball, are rapidly getting there, as the schools with the most TV money use their resources to pull away from the have-nots.

No school from outside the Power Five elite has won a women’s volleyball or softball championship since 1998. Just one has even made it to a national final in 17 years. In baseball, just Coastal Carolina has broken through (2016) in the past 10 years. Some still make it to Omaha, site of the College World Series, but nobody else has even managed a runner-up in the past decade.

So wide is the divide becoming that among the 19 teams UH fields for NCAA competition, the school’s only realistic hopes for capturing a national title in the current era might come down to sand volleyball and men’s volleyball.

In the emerging sport of sand volleyball UH has been the most competitive of the non-Power Five programs, managing two third-place finishes and a fourth in the three years the NCAA has held national championships.

But it is men’s volleyball where the opportunity remains the most promising for UH and the so-called mid and low majors. Long Beach State is the current national champion, one of five non-Power Five schools that have held the title in the past seven years. Over the past decade, six have won it and five others have been runners-up.

Since fewer than 50 schools compete on the Division I-II level and men’s volleyball teams are limited to awarding just 4.5 scholarships per year, there is plenty of top level talent to go around. That was amply illustrated by the Big West Conference having the top four teams in the American Volleyball Coaches Association poll at one point this season and seven of the top 10 teams this week coming from outside the Power Five.

For the ’Bows, then, history tells us these NCAAs are an overdue opportunity not to be missed.

NATIONAL CHAMPIONS

UH teams that won national titles

1979 — AIAW women’s volleyball

1982 — NCAA women’s volleyball

1983 — NCAA women’s volleyball

1987 — NCAA women’s volleyball

2001 — ICSA women’s sailing

2002 — NCAA men’s volleyball*

2004 — ICSA coed sailing

*—Later vacated by NCAA order.

Source: UH.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.