Hawaii’s reflections on last year’s run to the Big West women’s basketball tournament championship include a reminder of the slender margin of error in postseason play.

The Rainbow Wahine returned to Henderson, Nev., on Sunday for the first time since capturing the program’s second Big West tournament title last March. While the images of the celebration endure, so does the memory of a tenuous opening to the 2022 tournament, when top-seeded UH needed a stop in the final seconds of fend off Cal State Bakersfield 48-47 in the quarterfinals.

“We remember the Bakersfield game last year,” UH coach Laura Beeman said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “There’s no one on this team that’s taking this tournament lightly. They understand what’s at stake. If you don’t get what’s at stake then you’re going to get your butt kicked in the first round and you’ll go home.”

Nine players who experienced last year’s tournament title are back in Henderson, where the third-seeded Rainbow Wahine (15-14) face sixth seed Cal State Fullerton (14-15) today at 6:30 p.m. in the last of four women’s quarterfinal games at the Dollar Loan Center.

The tournament opened Tuesday with the lower seeds winning both first-round games. No. 9 seed CSU Bakersfield held off No. 8 Cal State Northridge 55-52 in the first game. No. 10 seed UC Riverside, under acting head coach and former UH assistant Brad Langston, knocked off No. 7 Cal Poly 63-54.

UH enters today’s meeting with Cal State Fullerton looking to reach the semifinals for the fourth straight year. The Wahine swept the regular-season series with the Titans with a 66-53 win in Manoa on Jan. 7 and a 60-54 victory on Feb. 11 in Fullerton, Calif., to extend their winning streak in the overall series to seven.

Cal State Fullerton coach Jeff Harada, a Hawaii Baptist Academy alum and former Hawaii Pacific University coach, has the Titans on a three-game winning streak entering the tournament, shooting 43% from the field, including 51% from 3-point range (21-for-41), during that stretch.

Guards Fujika Nimmo and Una Jovanovic, both All-Big West second-team picks, each average just over 14 points per game, and forward Ruby MacDonald went 7-for-7 behind the arc in wins over CSU Bakersfield and UC San Diego last week.

“They definitely are jelling better as a team,” Beeman said. “They’ve got multiple people who can do multiple things on the floor.

“(Harada) puts them in positions to attack to their strong hand so they can really get downhill quickly, and it requires you to understand your scout, your personnel, be in the right spots.”

UH guard Lily Wahinekapu wore a Cal State Fullerton uniform in last year’s tournament and closed her freshman season with a 26-point effort in the Titans’ 80-68 loss to UC Irvine in the quarterfinals.

Now an All-BWC first-team selection at UH, Wahinekapu averaged 12 points in UH’s two wins against the Titans this season, going 9-for-15 from the field and 5-for-6 from 3-point range.

The Wahine enter the tournament having won seven of their last nine games, despite losing four players to season-ending injuries since the start of 2023. They climbed over .500 to end the regular season after a 1-7 start against a nonconference schedule that entered this week at a collective 150-66. Five of those teams own at least 20 wins, including No. 5 Stanford (28-5, 13-5 Pac 12) and No. 21 UNLV (28-2, 18-0 Mountain West).

Portland (23-8) knocked off No. 16 Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference championship game on Tuesday and UH’s early-season schedule included two losses to ASUN regular-season champion Florida Gulf Coast (30-3, 17-1).

“We always schedule hard and we do it for a reason,” Beeman said. “It teaches you resilience at a very early stage in-season. … It really shows you what kids are buying into team and buying into the process. Never doubted it with with this group. They’ve been outstanding from the beginning.

“Playing those types of teams … it caused them to be able to say, ‘OK, we’ve played the best of the best, let’s go.’”